Delayed Reaction: After Yang

Premise: In a not-too-distant future, a father goes looking for a way to repair the robot sibling he purchased for his adopted daughter.

 

My main memory about this movie is how quiet it feels. I don’t know that it actually is quiet. It’s just the tone of the movie. The film is basically an extended obituary, which is a type of movie I realized I like a lot. Citizen Kane I truly love, and that’s about a reporter finding out about a man’s life. I adore Me & Earl & the Dying Girl, and a lot of that has to do with the scene at the end when it explores the Dying Girl’s room after the funeral. I love the idea of investigating a life without the person. Hell, one of the most formative shows for me is the old MTV competition Room Raiders which was all about trying to piece together who someone was based on their room. After Yang starts as a somewhat bureaucratic quest for Collin Farrell to get the robot sibling, Yang, back for his daughter, but it turns into a journey into the unseen sides of Yang. The more I think about it, the more I’m liking the movie.

 

Writer/director Kogonada seems to like these low energy films. His first movie, Columbus, could lazily be describe as “two sad loners walk around Columbus, IN”. After Yang has the same energy, but it works for it. Collin Farrell has sneakily turned into an internal actor. I don’t need him to give some big speech to understand the curiosity and fear that drives him for much of the movie. At first, he’s afraid he needs Yang because he won’t be enough for his daughter, then it turns into a realization that he never got to know Yang as well as he could’ve. Farrell is really good in this. I was happy to see Haley Lu Richardson come back. I do wish Jodie Turner-Smith had a bit more to do, but some of that was the design of the movie.

 

I didn’t love After Yang. Kogonada is a bit too deliberate with the pace and vision for the film. It really needed a few more moments of life like those excellent opening credits. Really excellent opening credits. I’m likely to rewatch those before I ever rewatch the movie. And perhaps that implicitly promised something early that the movie then ran away from. And there was something too familiar about the realization of Yang’s past life. It felt a lot like Bicentennial Man or even late-stage Janet on The Good Place. When Farrell goes through Yang’s memories, that really should’ve wrecked me. It the exact kind of thing I respond to.

 

Verdict: Weakly Recommend