After Yang (2021)

Directed by Kogonada. Written by Alexander Weinstein and Kogonoda.

Oh so tender, After Yang wants us to consider life’s existential questions while we listen to melancholy music and watch a family decide what to do with a synthetic sibling who suddenly malfunctions and proves difficult to resurrect. 

Yang (Justin H. Min) is a so-called technosapien, a humanoid robot. Parents Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) bought him as an older sibling for their adopted daughter Mika (Melea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) whose Chinese roots they don’t share. He’s meant to bridge the gap between the culture of her biological ancestry and the life she leads here in an undisclosed futuristic Western city. Quite the arrangement. Of course, his ability as a social mechanism isn’t why Mika’s devastated when he breaks, but rather because he’s a kind, attentive sibling who loves her back.

So it’s distressing when he shuts down, and Jake and Kyra must try and have him repaired, despite finances being a little tight. As Jake drags Yang around town to repairmen both official and unofficial, we learn there was more to Yang that meets the eye. Far from a set of wires, he’s actually a being with memories (bits he deemed worthy recording and storing) and perhaps even has feelings inspired by those memories. What to do? Can you really just give up on someone like this as if they were a last-gen gizmo? 

The question of Yang’s fate and what makes a person a person is not new in pop culture. From classics like Blade Runner to forgettable action flicks like I, Robot, the idea of non-human beings approaching “human” thoughts and feelings has been done before and to greater success. After Yang doesn’t take the idea in any new directions, instead it merely settles for some rather obvious conclusions that please rather than push perspectives. 

Pleasant is perhaps an apt one-word summation for the whole affair as an experience that features soft-spoken arguments, emotionally intelligent characters and set design that fuses far east Asia and Scandinavian home decor. Part spa experience, part science fiction, Kogonada’s serene and gentle film sees pensive moments set to music ultimately win out over any real interrogation of its central idea, appealing to our feelings rather than our intellect.  

A flashback scene sees Yang and Mike walk through an urban garden, and Mika confesses she’s being mocked for being adopted. Yang deftly reassures her by explaining her situation with a tree graft metaphor. Yes, this branch has been added on, but the resulting tree is no less a tree because of it. A touching scene.

Compare this scene to what comes later as Jake grapples with Yang’s fate. We watch him stare into nothing while schmaltzy music plays, apparently undecided whether Yang really mattered in the grand human scheme of things. The same Yang who we’ve seen offer sage advice, emotional acuity, and genuine companionship to this family. Are you kidding me?

Reading this might make it seem the film thinks of Jake as a villain, someone cold and indifferent, but Kogonoda treats him as a naive man taught by Yang’s absence the same way his daughter was taught by Yang’s presence. Kogonada seems naive about his own story as a consequence, with its dilemma let down by an unsurprising and foregone conclusion. Worse yet, the journey there is one of excessive sentimentalism. 

There’s no rough edge to this film, nothing to really seize you, only a simplified confirmation of an emotional truth that every pet owner under the sun could have told you: it’s not only humans who can have personalities, and it’s not only humans our hearts can grow to love. Add to that an overreliance on weepy music to add pathos to proceedings, and After Yang starts to feel like a MTV-ified take on existentialism. A film that’s nice to look at with intellectual rigor that belongs in a music video.