With “After Yang,” the distinctive filmmaker Kogonada has made a movie that is at once ambitious yet timid, asking big questions but providing no answers, not even clues. It’s a thought experiment, but a thought that meanders.
Like the recent“Swan Song,”“After Yang,” which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January, explores family life in the near future. It’s not a dystopian future, just an emotionally chilly one.
Tea shop owner Jake (Colin Farrell,“The Batman”)and corporate executive Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith, “Anne Boleyn”) are a biracial couple raising a Chinese-born adopted daughter. They want their child, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) to be grounded in Chinese culture, so since birth the child has been home-schooled by a robot, or “techno-sapien,” named Yang (Justin H. Min).
One morning, Yang doesn’t wake up. Rebooting doesn’t work. Mika is inconsolable. The repairs would be expensive, and Kyra senses an opportunity. Maybe they can rework their job schedules to free up more time for Mika and actually, well, be her parents.
“We need to be more involved,” Kyra says. “It’s on us.”
This all happens in the first few minutes, and so far so good: We’re set up for a family drama with a modern, sci-fi twist.
But then the film becomes something else. To satisfy Mika, Jake becomes obsessed with fixing Yang before “he begins to decompose.” An off-the-grid techno-sapien repairman discovers a secret file within Yang’s core. Could Yang have been owned by other people before Jake and Kyra? If so, what will his memories reveal?
Who cares? Yang is the least interesting character in the film. In flashbacks, he is friendly, but quiet and distant, occasionally uttering a Yoda-like nugget of wisdom. He seems to like his family, but it seems feigned, which of course it is. It is merely part of his programming.
Jake becomes so obsessed with the mystery of Yang that Kyra and Mika disappear from the film in long stretches.
As in his compelling 2017 film“哥伦布”,in whichJohn Chois an out-of-towner who strikes up a friendship with an architectural enthusiast (Haley Lu Richardson, who drops in unexpectedly in “After Yang”), Kogonada is exploring loneliness and the longing for human connection.
But here, it’s all rather vague. It even looks vague. Benjamin Loeb’s cinematography is so dark that scene after scene practically looks pitch-black.
在一个闪回,杨问杰克他爱的原因tea so much. Jake says he was inspired by a documentary about a man in “pursuit of this elusive tea — this process that was connected to the soil, to the plants, to the weather and to a way of life.”
In other words, what’s fascinating are things that arealive. Which Yang is not, and never was.
K“After Yang”:Sci-fi drama. Starring Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith, Justin H. Min and Haley Lu Richardson. Directed by Kogonada. (PG. 96 minutes.) Opens Friday, March 4, at Landmark’s Albany Twin, 1115 Solano Ave., Albany. 510-525-4531.landmarktheatres.com