After Yang – first-look review

If Kogonada’s debut fea­ture Colum­bus nav­i­gat­ed the fer­tile ground of how peo­ple relate to places, his fol­low-up moves onto the slight­ly more ambi­tious ques­tion of how we relate to the world at large. What shapes our under­stand­ing of life, fam­i­ly, soci­ety and our place with­in it? How is a mem­o­ry formed? What does the brain choose to archive and forget? 

Adapt­ed from the short sto­ry ​‘Say­ing Good­bye to Yang’ about a fam­i­ly in the near­ish future pay­ing a long farewell to their robot com­pan­ion, After Yang is an expan­sive yet inti­mate por­trait of grief and iden­ti­ty, and cements its writer/​director as one of the most excit­ing new voic­es in cinema.

Jake (Col­in Far­rell), Kyra (Jodie Turn­er Smith), Mika (Malea Emma Tjan­draw­id­ja­ja) and Yang (Justin H Min) are a fam­i­ly. They live in a serene sub­ur­ban house with lush green­ery and plen­ty of nat­ur­al light. They take part in reg­u­lar online dance-off com­pe­ti­tions. It just so hap­pens that Yang is a ​“big broth­er” tech­no-sapi­en, pur­chased when Jake and Kyra adopt­ed Mika from Chi­na, in order to help their daugh­ter forge and main­tain a rela­tion­ship to her home­land and culture. 

At the start of the film, Yang suf­fers a seri­ous mal­func­tion, and the fam­i­ly are dev­as­tat­ed by their loss. Jake attempts to find a way to repair him and inad­ver­tent­ly begins to piece togeth­er ele­ments of Yang’s life to which they were pre­vi­ous­ly obliv­i­ous. Through access­ing the robot’s mem­o­ries, Jake begins a process of mourn­ing and dis­cov­ery that extends to every­one who knew Yang.

This high con­cept sci-fi could eas­i­ly feel dystopi­an or ster­ile, but Kogonada’s gen­tle touch and aes­thet­ic sen­si­bil­i­ties avoid this. After Yang envi­sions a soft­er tech­no future, plush with trees and grass and sun­light, where cloning and androids are a part of every­day life but the nat­ur­al world is still embraced. There’s a deep sense of seren­i­ty and melan­choly about this world, in which tech­nol­o­gy has made life easy in many ways, but also cre­at­ed rifts. Jake and Kyra work hard, and wor­ry if they’ve been too absent as par­ents; if Mika has come to rely on Yang too much.

The rich­ness of Kogonada’s cin­e­matog­ra­phy and pro­duc­tion design is matched by his the­mat­ic ambi­tion. Although some of the dia­logue feels a lit­tle stilt­ed, there are moments that feel excep­tion­al­ly poignant such as Mika singing to her father and Yang dis­cussing with Jake what it means to be Asian. The rep­e­ti­tion of lines and images through­out dri­ves home a sense of memory’s slip­pery nature; what might be fact today could be fic­tion tomor­row in the mind’s eye. 

For all its pon­der­ing, how­ev­er, it should also be said After Yang is fun­ny, too. The open­ing cred­its sequence is a burst of whim­sy, and Farrell’s Wern­er Her­zog impres­sion while he tells Yang about Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht’s All in This Tea man­ages to be charm­ing and sig­nif­i­cant in one breath. It’s a fam­i­ly por­trait cap­tured with ten­der­ness and skill. There are shades of Ter­rence Mal­ick in Kogonada’s rev­er­ence for the nat­ur­al world, but he man­ages to cre­ate some­thing that is com­plete­ly his own, brim­ming with intri­cate detail and del­i­cate soul.

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