Still Night, Burning House is a deeply impactful documentary from Carol Nguyễn, who uses her own family’s trauma over the loss of a loved one to show how generational grief and pain scar, as well as the guilt of not being able to save those closest to you. A tremendous and devastating documentary. Essential viewing.

Filmmaker Carol Nguyễn charts her family’s first reunion since her uncle’s mysterious death. Travelling together to Vietnam, the family embark on a revelatory and at times uncanny journey through intergenerational trauma and layered loss.

Familial loss is inescapable. Whether it be grandparents, aunts and uncles, parents, cousins, it is going to hit you like a rock. When it’s an untimely one? Well, the pain is tenfold. Carol Nguyễn has given us an exceptionally personal documentary, yet one that every one of us has, or will, relate to at some point in our lives, even if the manner of death is different. The pain of it is.

Learning how Uncle Thatch died is immensely interesting; the adults decide to hide it from the children, not to let them bear the truth of how he left them. So they lie; they say it was from a fall, then a heart attack. But the truth is more telling, and at first you may see it as shame, but it’s actually deeply rooted in guilt. His brothers couldn’t save him, despite doing their utmost. His illness was too much for him to handle, so when Nguyễn obtains access to his vast medical records and the post-treatment interviews, we begin to learn the truth. Not only that, his brothers, wife and daughters also begin to learn more about the man who left them far too soon.

Nguyễn takes her family back home to Vietnam, where we learn about some customs around death, but also see how her father is coping with the loss of his brother. Constantly standing off, looking into the distance with one leg up on a small wall, he is contemplative, a million thoughts and emotions running through his mind at once. It warms you as they reminisce while also whacking you straight in the heart with how painful it is for the family, especially when one of Thatch’s daughters retells the story of an ex-boyfriend who also had Thatch’s illness.

What stays with you in that scene is that she is devastated that she couldn’t help him, like she couldn’t help her father, even though she was only a child. As that is happening, Haong, Carol’s father, is visibly upset. Guilt running through him, perhaps and most likely having never left him. It’s upsetting to watch; all real instances of recording grief are. We all bring our own personal demons into such a space that it can be difficult to rid yourself of them in such situations; this I know from personal experience. Loss is a hateful thing. It fills you with what-ifs.

Nguyễn has done something magnificent with Still Night, Burning House; she has shown us the horrible complexities that surround untimely deaths and how each of us feels pain differently. Even the process of healing and mourning is different, as we see with her father and uncle. Her uncle asks questions, while her father compartmentalises everything, rarely letting his emotions and thoughts surface. This is a film for anyone who has lost a loved one; you connect with it so intensely that it can be hard to describe. What is true is that this will stick with me for quite a while.

An astonishingly important, beautiful, and emotional film, you cannot overstate how much you need to see Still Night, Burning House.

★★★★★

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