It's possible Monsoon is born out of the writer/director's deep feelings about Vietnam and the war. But we'll never really know because he does a fairly poor job of communicating them. Mostly the film just generates confusion and a fair amount of tedium. Henry Golding is Kit, a gay Brit who fled Vietnam at age six with his parents and brother. Now he's come back to scatter his parents ashes. The problem with this is that, though we learn little about his parents and his life, we do learn that a) neither of them ever wanted to return to Vietnam, b) they forbade both sons to return, c) Kit has, at best, mixed feelings about his homeland, and for most of his life seems to have given it little thought. So when his cousin finally, after much angst all round, observes that his parents fought so hard to leave, yet now he's brought them back, it seems like not just a very good point, but the only sensible thing anyone in the film has to say on the subject. Henry Golding is nice to look at, but not an accomplished enough actor to bring any real weight to such a flimsy premise. His romance with Lewis, an American ex-pat, is fleetingly intriguing, if somewhat passionless and ultimately pointless. And after 85 minutes of rambling around some of the less-interesting parts of Vietnam, the film ends abruptly, without ever delivering anything much in the way of insight. I've learnt more about Vietnam, its people, it's culture and the war from Luke Nguyen Vietnam cooking series.
