After Yang was reviewed out of the Sundance Film Festival, where it made its North American premiere, and will be released later this year.
A sci-fi mystery turned inside out, After Yang is an achingly gorgeous film about clones and androids, loss and memory, culture and family, all bound by a breathtaking visual approach. Written and directed by Kogonada, and adapted from the short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang” by Alexander Weinstein, the film unfolds an unknown number of decades (or centuries) from now, in a matter-of-fact future where artificially intelligent older siblings are commonplace for adopted children. When Yang (Justin H. Min), the older brother of Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) malfunctions beyond repair, his parents, Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), learn that he may have been more than just a standard “Technobeing.” As the aloof Jake uncovers Yang’s beautiful secrets, they force him to reflect on his own life, and on the experiences he may have been missing out on as a father, a husband, and a human being.
The futuristic world Kogonada creates, with costume and production designers Arjun Bhasin and Alexandra Schaller, is one of serenity, with numerous Chinese, Japanese, and other East Asian designs woven into its fabric. It’s an inverse cyberpunk of sorts; more of a utopia, with shimmering buildings far in the backdrop, than the dystopic, Blade Runner-esque pan-Asian influence that pervades most western sci-fi. The music by Aska Matsumiya (with one theme by the legendary Ryuichu Sakamoto) is sweet and wistful. Jake and Kyra dress in comfortable Japanese kimonos, and Jake even runs a Chinese tea shop. Their daughter is a Chinese adoptee, and in order to better connect her to her cultural heritage, they purchased Yang second-hand (“certified refurbished,” Jake adds) several years ago to teach her fun facts about China. They’re a happy family, and if the synchronized dance competition during the opening credits is anything to go by — a colorful blast featuring numerous other families with androids and apparent clones — they’re a typical family as well, though one whose daily interactions occasionally feel on autopilot.
When Yang shuts down, Jake’s overbearing neighbor George (Clifton Collins Jr.) directs him to a conspiracy-minded repairman, Russ (Ritchie Coster), since Yang is out of warranty. Here, Jake discovers that his walking cultural encyclopedia of a son may also have come equipped with malicious spyware. However, given Yang’s capacity for learning, his recordings turn out to have been more complex and more selective than mere metadata harvesting. Yang, it seems, had been recording memories, something of which “Technosapiens” ought to be incapable, according to museum curator Cleo (Sarita Choudhury), a woman who studies the wonders of artificial beings. When Jake begins watching these memories back, in the form of brief video files he accesses through slick VR glasses, it opens up a whole new world for the quiet tea salesman, and a whole new understanding of what — or who — he has actually lost.
For most of the film, Kogonada and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb present Jake and Kyra’s world with a calculated stillness. The carefully composed 2.35:1 widescreen frame captures the family in languid wide and medium shots evocative of Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu (whose frequent screenwriter Noda Kōgo was the inspiration for Kogonada’s pseudonym). These interior scenes, which are mostly set in the family’s kitchen, and in various rooms around their warmly lit modernist home, have damp and flat digital quality — as if the RAW video files had been color-timed only slightly — but the images are just bright enough, and just colorful enough, to feel inviting on the surface. Nothing is wrong with their household per se, apart from the odd disagreement. Though the couple only discovers the emotional distance between them when they finally recognize the beauty they’ve been missing.
The film’s palette changes drastically whenever it presents Yang’s memories, filmed from his point of view. His gaze often falls on formations made by sunlight and shadow, and on food and nature, as if he were a photographer capturing the world’s silent music. The aspect ratio expands vertically to a full-frame 16:9. The colors are richer and fuller. They pop as if they were shot on film, though the camera used throughout the shoot was a digital Alexa Mini. And yet, this re-creation of something tactile and tangible extends to impersonating even the flaws of celluloid, like its distinct film grain, which makes Yang’s memories feel both alive and imperfect. Perhaps there’s little difference between film and digital when they’re both capable of the same artistry; perhaps the same goes for real and artificial beings.
Seeing the world through Yang’s eyes makes him feel human, but it also makes Jake take a closer look at his family and himself — at times literally, since Yang’s perspective takes the form of close-ups of past conversations. But when Kogonada and Loeb film these memories, they also imbue them with a handheld quality, and a sense of life and unpredictability. An exciting feeling, which Jake has long forgotten.
Soon, Jake and Kyra’s own memories of Yang begin to move away from the muted stillness with which they had been viewing the world. The appearance of their own flashbacks, as they reflect on their loss, grows closer to Yang’s fleeting, lyrical snapshots — which are also all that remains of their son. The melancholy with which Farrell and Turner-Smith carried themselves, even when Yang was “alive,” soon begins to move over and make room for something more emotionally complicated. Something more complete, as they begin to see the human nuances they overlooked. When they play his recordings back-to-back, the brief clips take the form of ethereal, documentarian montages filled with impressions of nature. And when they find, within his memories, a girl they don’t recognize (Haley Lu Richardson), this introduces further questions of whether Yang may have been capable of forming relationships outside of them.
Kogonada draws from documentaries about memory not only while crafting his visuals, but while weaving his intricate screenplay. Jake often recalls an old film he watched (Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht’s All in This Tea), in which a German man whose name he can’t remember — sadly, in this future, Werner Herzog has slipped from memory, though Farrell does a worthy impression! — who extolls the virtues of tea as an herb whose taste has the power to conjure a distinct time and place. However, Jake is dismayed that he himself doesn’t share this relationship to the drink that consumes his work and keeps him away from his family. Though while playing back Yang’s memories, he notices details he previously missed, like the way Yang had expressed similar feelings and wishes about tea. As much as Jake regrets losing an expensive machine, he also begins to mourn the person he never truly got to know — someone whose incompleteness wasn’t all that different from his own.
As Yang, Min asks wide-eyed questions about the world, even when he speaks in factual statements. Kogonada, who also edited the film, presents several memories twice over, from different angles — first as recorded by Yang, and then as recalled by Jake or Kyra — and each presentation features an ever-so-slightly modulated performance, with Min speaking alternatingly in droll tones and comforting whispers. The question of how human Yang was may not be central to the plot (which mostly concerns Jake trying to track down the girl from his memories, and learn why he may have been drawn to her), but it invades each conversation, thanks to the way Min’s eyes seem to silently ask it every turn. He brings a radiant kindness to Yang, especially in his playful scenes with Mika — they lovingly refer to each other with Chinese honorifics like “mei mei” (younger sister) and “gege” (older brother) — but the broad question of his humanity also leads to other lingering dilemmas, about what it means for an artificial creation to be Chinese, or Asian, or to bear the sole responsibility of cultural authenticity in Mika’s life. As much as the film is about probing Yang’s personal memories, it’s just as much about his lack of cultural memory as well, something he longs for, and wishes he possessed, in a form more real than geographical trivia.
The film, however, rarely asks any of these questions in words. Instead, it draws us into its piercing imagery, and allows us the room, and the time, to decode it alongside Jake and Kyra, whose subdued surroundings are soon replaced by vibrancy, whenever they step into Yang’s leftover thoughts as a way to grieve. Even the user interface to access each memory is ingeniously conceived; its design resembles glowing stars in the night sky, laid out in points along invisible lines extending in all directions. The layout recalls diagrams and illustrations of the early expansion of space-time in the wake of the Big Bang — the moments right after creation (Yang’s name, after all, means light). Each time the couple picks a new memory, they discover some new layer to Yang’s perspective, whether it was the way he saw the world, the gentleness with which he viewed the girl in the images, whether he feared death or felt loss, or even how felt about his family. In After Yang, discovering the way someone loved you, after they’ve died, is no less than uncovering the secrets of the universe.
It’s a story told primarily through texture and cinematic aesthetics, one where decoding the meaning and poetry behind images not only becomes an active process shared with human characters, but an experience akin to understanding more about the world, and your place within it, the way the android Yang tries to uncover the meaning of his own existence. It’s science-fiction at its most moving and soul-stirring. An enrapturing and reflective tale about how and why we ascribe meaning to images, objects, and people, and about appreciating life before it passes you by.
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