If Columbus was a strong opening statement by a new voice in cinema, After Yang cements Kogonada as one of the most humanist filmmakers working today, and there's no telling what he can accomplish next.
This is intimate, wistful science fiction that is most concerned with the personal, even the sentimental, down to the plaintive piano strains of Ryuichi Sakamoto’s main musical theme. In After Yang, the future is strange, but not to be feared.
The film arguably has more ideas than it can entirely accommodate – never such a bad thing, although After Yang might frustrate viewers hoping for a more cogently packaged narrative wrap-up.
Kogonada isn’t one to put too fine a point on things — another of the many graces he inherited from Ozu — but the touching sentimentality of this film’s second half doesn’t get in the way of his quiet inquiry into how people hold onto a concrete idea of themselves in such a non-homogeneous future
Like a quieter Philip K. Dick and “Blade Runner”... “After Yang” is a terrific existential take on those big the human condition questions about robots, A.I., their capacity for humanity, and what it all reflects and says about our own understanding of life.
The movie’s pulse seldom rises above resting, but the director invites audiences to dive as deep as they want to go into the film’s themes, to read subtext into body language, silence and the space between characters.
This is a film of transporting grace and compassion, cerebral but never cold. It’s no small compliment to say that After Yang seems almost like an American sci-fi movie that Ozu or Kore-eda might have made.
The idea at the core is both original and relevant, raising themes of parenting, marriage and the disconnect that falls within families. It could have been executed in a much more poignant way but the refined dialogue and pursuit of style over substance makes it a missed triumph.