After Yang: The Android in the Family Attic

After Yang opens with a dance competition, and the opening is a small act of aggression. Four families in matching outfits, filmed in bright flat frontal compositions, performing synchronised choreography against thousands of other families in a global online game called Function. The sequence is delirious and slightly menacing, the camera locked off, the cutting metronomic, and it goes on long enough to become genuinely strange. Then one family drops out, because one of them has stopped moving, and Kogonada cuts to black and puts the title up. Everything after that is quiet.

That structure is the film in miniature. You get one burst of futurity, and then ninety minutes of a man sitting in a room trying to work out what he lost. Kogonada’s second feature is a bereavement drama that happens to have an android in it, and the calm with which it declines to be a science-fiction spectacle is the whole point of the exercise.

The family, the tea shop, the technosapien

Jake (Colin Farrell) sells tea. Not the fashionable kind — leaf tea, sourced properly, in a shop that is failing because nobody in this near-future has the patience. His wife Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) works long hours at something corporate. Their daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) is adopted, Chinese, and small. And because Jake and Kyra worried about what it would mean to raise a Chinese daughter in a household with no Chinese in it, they bought her a brother: Yang (Justin H. Min), a refurbished “technosapien” sold as a cultural sibling, loaded with facts about China and programmed to be an older brother.

Yang breaks. That is the plot. The warranty is dead, the manufacturer is gone, the certified repair options are grim, and Jake spends the film carrying his son’s body around a series of small businesses trying to find someone who can fix him. Farrell plays Jake as a man who has been slightly absent from his own household for years and is now, too late, discovering how much of it Yang was holding up. It is one of the most restrained performances of Farrell’s career, all downward inflections and half-finished sentences, and it works because he never plays the grief directly. He plays a man doing errands.

Kogonada adapted this from Alexander Weinstein’s short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang”, a few pages in a 2016 collection, and the adaptation’s fidelity is to tone rather than incident. The story’s essential joke — that a family’s most profound loss arrives with a service manual and a question about whether the extended warranty covered it — survives intact. The film’s saddest scenes are all administrative.

The video essayist’s grammar

Before Columbus (2017), Kogonada was known for video essays: precise, wordless supercuts made for Sight & Sound and the Criterion Collection, isolating a director’s habits until the habit became visible. He made one about Ozu’s passageways. He made one about Kubrick’s one-point perspective. His working name is a nod to Kogo Noda, who wrote Ozu’s screenplays for two decades.

That is not trivia. It is the film’s method statement. After Yang is constructed almost entirely from the Ozu vocabulary: the low, static camera; the cut to an empty room before anyone enters it and after everyone leaves; the conversation staged with both actors facing forward rather than each other; the refusal of a reaction shot at the moment a lesser film would insist on one. Benjamin Loeb’s photography keeps finding those Ozu transitions — a corridor, a hanging cloth, a kettle — and holding them for a beat past comfort.

The production design does the corresponding work. This future has no glass slabs and no blue holograms. It is wood, paper, textile, sliding panel, warm light. The cars drive themselves and nobody comments. The interfaces are ambient and mostly invisible. Kogonada’s future is the one where the technology finally learned to shut up, and that decision is what allows an android’s death to register as a domestic event rather than a genre one.

The sound is the third leg. Aska Matsumiya’s score is sparse to the point of shyness, and the film’s emotional anchor is a song: “Glide”, by the fictional Lily Chou-Chou, lifted directly out of Shunji Iwai’s All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) and performed here in a version by Mitski. Importing a fictional pop star from another film about adolescent loneliness, and letting her be the thing this family shares, is the kind of move a critic makes when he becomes a director. It is a citation you can cry to.

The memory bank

The film’s one science-fiction device is worth the whole apparatus. Yang, it turns out, has been recording a few seconds of memory per day — a fragment, unlabelled, chosen by criteria nobody can explain. Jake gets access to the bank and Kogonada renders it as a field of points in black space, days arranged as constellations, each one openable into a scrap of footage that lasts about as long as a breath.

Everything good about the film lives in that image. A memory bank in most science fiction is a hard drive, and hard drives dramatise badly. Kogonada makes it a night sky, and then makes Jake into an astronomer — drifting, selecting, watching three seconds of a hand in sunlight and then three seconds of Mika laughing and then three seconds of something he does not recognise at all. The device turns bereavement into browsing, which is the most contemporary emotion the film has, and the most quietly devastating.

The mechanics matter too. Three seconds a day is not a recording of a life. It is an edit of one, made continuously, by the person living it. So what Jake is actually reading is not Yang’s experience. It is Yang’s taste — what he chose to keep. The film understands that a curated archive is a self-portrait, and it lets that sink in without a single line of dialogue explaining it.

The honest case against

After Yang is slow in the way that invites the accusation of preciousness, and some of the accusation sticks. Kyra is thinly drawn; Turner-Smith is a fine actress given a role that mostly exists to be elsewhere, and the film’s marriage never quite convinces as a thing worth saving. The museum subplot, with a researcher (Sarita Choudhury) who wants Yang’s bank for institutional reasons, is efficient exposition dressed as a moral question and it does not survive much pressure. And there is a strand of thinking about ethnicity — the family who purchased Chinese heritage for their daughter as a household appliance — that the film raises with real nerve and then handles at arm’s length. That is a big idea to open and leave in the room.

You could also argue that Kogonada’s borrowed grammar is doing more work than his own writing. When the film is composing, it is exceptional. When it is talking, it can drift towards the aphoristic — characters saying things about caterpillars and butterflies that a video essay would have been too rigorous to include.

None of it undoes the last twenty minutes.

The real ancestor

The reflex answer is A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and Spielberg’s film is in the room. Steven Spielberg made the definitive picture about a synthetic child who wants to be loved, and After Yang inverts it: here the synthetic one is the adult, the competent one, the person actually doing the parenting, and the humans are the ones who need explaining to.

The truer ancestor is Tokyo Story (1953). Ozu’s film is about a family who discover, when it is too late to act on it, that the person who held them together was standing quietly at the edge of every frame they never bothered to look at. Kogonada has made that film with a technosapien in the role, and the science fiction exists to make the negligence literal — you cannot claim you did not notice a family member if he was, on the record, filing three seconds of you every day for years.

For the collector, the deeper cut is Robot Carnival and its segment about a mechanical woman built for company and then abandoned in an attic. The image of the android in the loft, still running, still remembering, is older than any of us think. And if you want the direct rebuttal — the film that says an artificial mind’s interiority is a threat rather than a bequest — Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is the coldest available answer, while Tarkovsky’s Solaris remains the film that asked whether a reconstructed person made of memory is a person at all.

It streams. Give it a dark room and no phone.

Spoilers below

Beyond this line, the film.

Yang is not repairable, and Kogonada establishes that early enough that the film stops being a rescue and becomes an inventory. What Jake finds in the bank is a life he was not told about: Yang has been in this family for a few years and in the world for far longer, refurbished and re-homed across generations, carrying every previous household with him. Three seconds a day, going back decades.

Inside those seconds is Ada (Haley Lu Richardson) — or rather two of her. The Ada that Jake meets in the present is a clone of a woman Yang knew in a previous family, and Yang recognised her, and said nothing. The film delivers this without a sting or a score cue. It simply lets Jake, and us, work out that the calm domestic helper in the corner of this house had a whole interior romance with mortality running behind his eyes, and chose to keep it to himself because nobody asked.

The most brutal scene is Mika’s. Kogonada has been quietly building her relationship with Yang through the grafting metaphor — the tree with two kinds of branches, the botanical explanation of how an adopted thing becomes real by being joined — and when Mika finally understands that Yang is gone, Tjandrawidjaja plays it with the flat, uncomprehending directness of a small child who has been told a fact she cannot use. There is no crescendo. Kogonada shoots it from the doorway, in the Ozu position, and holds.

The ending refuses both available consolations. Yang’s bank goes to the museum, which is a kind of survival and a kind of taxidermy. His body is not restarted. What the family gets is what an archive gives anyone — permission to look, and no reply. And then “Glide” comes up, and Mika sings, and the film ends on the one thing Yang left behind that was never in the recording. If you have ever gone through a dead person’s photographs looking for yourself and found, instead, a stranger’s whole private life, you already know why this film works.