After Yang

Directed by Kogonada

Running time: 1hr41 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Colin Farrell in After Yang

Considering that nobody has ever lived through it, the movies tend to have a strangely assured, uniform vision of what the future looks like: all hard, spartan surfaces in assorted shades of milk, steel and stone, like Marie Kondo gone to space. So it’s always pleasing to see a film design the future a little differently, as video essayist turned feature filmmaker Kogonada does in his bittersweet second film After Yang, beginning with the velvety, inviting palette of greens, reds and firefly yellows that soak into the screen. Which is not to say After Yang’s future is entirely unfamiliar: this is a world where humans, clones and android beings live in semi-harmony, as sci-fi writers have been imagining for eons. It’s the way they interact and rely on each other here that feels fresh: there’s a tenderness in these relationships that fits the film’s sensory warmth, even if it’s humans who questionably assume superior status.

Yang (Justin H. Min) is an android, albeit a very human one. A sweet, shy soul — whether or not he has one — he’s bought by a middle-class married couple (Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith) as a brother for their adopted Chinese daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). Such purchases are commonplace now, it seems: families can be man-made or manufactured or both. But something’s wrong with Yang, a malfunction in his core that, the longer various technicians probe at it, seems like it may as well be his heart. Unexpected revelations about his product history emerge in the process — some of them borne by cast standout Haley Lu Richardson, as radiant and fragile-hearted as she was in Kogonada’s debut Columbus. But Kogonada doesn’t fashion these developments as mind-fucking twists. This is intimate, wistful science fiction that is most concerned with the personal, even the sentimental, down to the plaintive piano strains of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s main musical theme. In After Yang, the future is strange, but not to be feared.

AFTER YANG (2021) Written by Kogonada, from the short story Saying Goodbye to Yang by Alexander Weinstein | Shot by Benjamin Loeb | Edited by Kogonada

Selected for Un Certain Regard at the 74th Cannes Film Festival