Arthouse darling Tsai Ming-liang is back, with the Malaysian-born Taiwanese director offering another definitive slow cinema experience. His fans will be keen to soak the latest work in, while the uninitiated will likely either mutter irritably to themselves or simply fall asleep. There were both at last night’s Melbourne International Film Festival screening of Tsai’s Back Home. I like to think that those of us who embrace his particular style of filmmaking have a lot of patience for the quiet mutterers or the light snorers. He is, admittedly, something of an acquired taste.

Back Home sees Tsai travel with actor Anong Houngheuangsy (Days) to his home town in Laos, and capturing what he sees there. What that means in practice is a meditative series of long takes, shot in a rural Lao village over a period of two weeks. The most exciting scene includes a group of children riding a merry-go-round while a dog, clearly frightened by the light and the noise, fruitlessly tries to escape the centre. The most challenging scenes are simply those of decrepit huts and houses in various states of disrepair.

It is, for any viewer raised on typical narrative dramas, a challenging affair. Tsai himself is the director of several exceptional dramatic works, including Rebels of the Neon God (1992), Vive L’amour (1994), and my personal favourite Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003). In recent years, however, he has become more dedicated to this specific style of patient, thoughtful art film. His Walker series, which feature actor Lee Kang-sheng dressed as a Buddhist monk walking very slowly around different locations, have gone from strength to strength with film festivals now actively commissioning him to present their own cities and countries in new instalments. Back Home lacks the walking monk, but it is very much in keeping in terms of how it arrests the viewer’s urgency and forces them to interact with glacially slow, thoughtful cinema.

I mean, ultimately, what is a viewer to do? You are trapped in the movie theatre with a long static shot of a run-down Lao dwelling, running several minutes in length. There is no musical score to manipulate your feelings of it, just diegetic recordings of the wind rustling the surrounding trees, or the sound of cars and trucks running down some nearby highway. Maybe there are humans in shot, but then again maybe not. Back Home, with its rural setting, features a surprising number of farm animals.

What the viewer hopefully does – the ones who haven’t fallen asleep – is start to intensely analyse each long take. Without nothing else to do, they can start considering the architecture of the building, or the height of the grass surrounding it. They might consider the way that the sunlight filters through leaves to cast a speckled shadow on the rusted corrugated iron roof. There is a discarded piece of cloth on the ground: how long has it been there. Why was it left there? Was it a piece of clothing, or just some abandoned rag? One soaks in each scene, and in doing so develops an unparalleled sense of place.

You are either going to get it or you aren’t. Honestly, you are perfectly justified in ignoring Tsai’s work entirely if you bounce off his singular, Buddhism-infused aesthetic. If you try out one of these films, and it sends you to sleep, we honestly don’t mind. To be honest Back Home is not his finest work, and his earlier films have been rather more insightful and evocative. Even with a work of medium quality though, there is something rather lovely about slowing down for 60 minutes and just appreciating the things we can see.

I do hope the dog got out okay.

Back Home has been screening at the Melbourne International Film Festival. For more information, click here.