After Yang review: Colin Ferrell asks big questions in somber new sci-fi movie

Polygon’s team reports from the virtual grounds of 2022 Sundance International Film Festival. They will be reporting on the next wave independent films in horror, sci-fi and documentary film.

Science fiction can be approached in many different ways. There’s science fiction for everyone. Surprisingly, the majority of science fiction stories are based on the same fundamental question. Is there a definition of human being? Many stories pose this question, comparing humanity to non-human existence. These include AIs, aliens, and near-human creations such as clones and cyborgs. Other stories put people in completely new settings, so that we can see how the human condition remains constant across time and space.

A24’s Yang after YangThis is the second feature film of video essayist. Columbus Kogonada is a writer and director who takes the familiar refrain back by dropping an artificial form of life in a mixed family to gauge their reactions. But Kogonada, adapting Alexander Weinstein’s short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” takes a new approach to the familiar metaphor. The film begins with the artificial lifeform malfunctioning and becoming inoperable. Each member of the family must decide how they will move forward without him.

Jake Farrell (Colin Farrell), the father of that family, owns a tea shop with traditional values, but is having trouble finding customers. He pretends that Kyra is his wife.Queen & Slim’s Jodie Turner-Smith) that it’s bustling to the point where it cuts into his availability for family time. It’s less clear what Kyra does, but she works long hours, and feels overstretched by his absences, which strain their marriage.

Mika is the daughter of Jake and Kyra. She spends more time with Yang (Justin H. Min), her family android, than she does with her parents. But, it’s understandable that Mika has a strong attachment, given his role as big brother. When Jake and Kyra adopted Mika, they bought Yang from a company that expressly designs surrogate older siblings for Chinese adoptees, to teach them Mandarin, feed them “fun facts” about Chinese history and culture, and otherwise connect them with their heritage. But Yang isn’t just an elaborate babysitting device — he’s kind, supportive, and sensitive, not just to Mika’s needs, but to everyone’s. Yang’s breakdown can cause a family to break down in subtle and small ways.

Yang after Yang can certainly be read as a metaphor for the ways people can become emotionally attached to and dependent on technology they don’t really understand. Unable to understand the internal workings of hard drives that store family photos and the phone contacts we use makes the loss of one of your most important possessions feel more grave. Early on, Jake and Kyra’s exasperation over Yang’s malfunction exactly mimics the frustration most people feel when a useful device breaks, replacing its usual convenience with cost and frustration.

But Kogonada’s film never feels like it’s pursuing such an impersonal agenda. This film is more of an elegy. It follows characters as they mourn the loss of a loved ones. The fact that Yang is an artificial person who could potentially be repaired or rebooted is beside the point, and so is the fact that Jake gains access to Yang’s memory files and starts to discover more about him after he’s in the repair shop. The story elements here may be different from those in similar internal cinema films such as “The Arthouse Films”, but they’re still the same. There are three colors: blue Or Ponette, The exploration of grief and navigation after loss are just as serious and subdued.

Yang after YangThe future is sketched only in passing. The audience can assume a few things about this world, where even a family that’s struggling financially can afford to live in a gracefully appointed, elegant Japanese-style home, and the guy next door (Westworld’s Clifton Collins Jr.) lives with a family of clones. There are some oddities in the few details that we have: A museum curator (The Green Knight’s Sarita Choudhury) tells Jake she’s spent her entire career trying to understand “technosapiens” like Yang, it becomes clear that we know very little about where these AIs came from, or why they’re such a mystery. Jake’s prejudice against clones leads to questions about him as well as them. This story is true to life, and does not care about any aspects of the characters’ lives or circumstances outside this chosen slice.

The setting makes up the difference in terms of aesthetics and world-building. Its futuristic elements are elegant and subtle. For example, cars have tiny moss-and fern gardens. Technology can also be integrated seamlessly into mundane objects. This world has beautiful things, all built around a simple, elegant, and restrained design, which makes them seem a bit abstracted, but not real. At the same time, it’s soothing and mournful, a perfect match for the restless but resigned emotions at play throughout the story. The tone matches the mood — apart from a wonderfully energetic dance competition toward the beginning of the film, which conceptually unites the movie’s core family with the otherwise-unseen families of the movie’s other primary characters, the film mostly operates with a library-worthy hush. Characters rarely speak more than a whisper. The audience is left to infer what the characters are saying.

As with many other science fiction stories, Yang after Yang doesn’t have answers to its rhetorical questions about the nature of humanity. It suggests, in the most delicate and glancing of ways, that understanding Yang’s connection to Mika helps Jake strengthen his own bond with her. The film also suggests Yang lost more than his family knew and is a greater loss than they could have imagined. It gets at an idea that’s often hard to communicate on film — that everyone contains a vast hidden world, and that every death is a vast loss. The film doesn’t make much distinction between Yang and his human family, apart from letting them into his hidden world after he’s gone. They are shown reliving their childhood memories as well as his past memories. The movie explores the themes of perception, willful blindness and other topics without rushing to any conclusion.

Kogonada is a great example of grief. Yang after Yang’s focus on the sensation of sitting with the inevitable, and slowly learning from it. His film’s refusal to externalize death as some easy-to-grasp evil that can be battled and defeated may leave some sci-fi fans untethered and unsatisfied. Yang after Yang is intensely internal and personal, as grief so often is, which guarantees it won’t connect with a wide audience. But as a collection of images and moods, all gently nudging at that central question of what defines a person, it’s gravely hypnotic. It’s an old question, asked in a new way, with deepest gravity and respect.

What to Watch: A24 announced the following: Yang after YangReleased in March but not yet set for release.