After Yang (2022)
Directed by Kogonada
When his young daughter's beloved companion — an android named Yang — malfunctions, Jake searches for a way to repair him. In the process, Jake discovers the life that has been passing in front of him, reconnecting with his wife and daughter across a distance he didn't know was there.
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6 films that influenced After Yang
What critics say influenced After Yang
Kogonada is exploring a similar theme here, albeit with sensitivity towards the A.I, which is something we have seen rarely, but recently in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina.
Audiences shouldn’t go in expecting something like Ex Machina , despite some similar themes.
A punchy dance routine for multiple families of four opens After Yang , and it’s easily the most exhilarating sequence of its kind in a film about artificial intelligence since Oscar Isaac and Sonoya Mizuno’s sexy boogie in Ex Machina .
Set in the near distant future in unnamed Asia (feels like Japan), families do what families do—love, laugh, cry, and share experiences (a vibrant virtual video game dance tournament at the beginning of the movie that cleverly introduces every character we’ll meet in the film is outstanding and rivals Oscar Isaac’s disco boogie scene in the similarly thoughtful sci-fi film, “Ex Machina”).
The similarities between this film and another A24 film 2014’s Ex Machina are striking and will jump out to anyone familiar with both, but what sets After Yang apart is how its story leans more into its existential questions than its science fiction aspects and setting.
Blade Runner , Ex Machina oder A.I. sind nur ein paar wenige ausgewählte Beispiele, die diese Thematik auf die Leinwand gebracht haben.
After Yang blends elements of Spike Jonze’s her and Steven Spielberg’s A.I. with Kogonada’s own brand of organic contemplation.
On paper it reads like an inverse A.I. Artificial Intelligence .
Blade Runner , Ex Machina oder A.I. sind nur ein paar wenige ausgewählte Beispiele, die diese Thematik auf die Leinwand gebracht haben.
Mandy cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, in an interview with IndieWire, described the process of making After Yang to “the conception of a good ramen broth.”
Teaming this time with Benjamin Loeb, who shot last year’s powerful Pieces of a Woman and Panos Cosmatos’ Mandy , there isn’t a frame wasted here: delicate and seductive one minute, fascinating and contemplative, yet always mesmeric, it fuses its ideas of the future (while not showing too much) with modern Far East architectural influences to whisk us off into the “near distant” while still feeling attached to the right now.
Benjamin Loeb ( Pieces Of A Woman ) is the cinematographer and you should remember his glorious work on the film, Mandy .
Tonally, the results aren’t far from Spike Jonze’s “Her,” though there are elements of “A.I.
I feel that the movie had a similar atmosphere to Her (2013) where the setting is just ever so slightly futuristic, and similarly explores emotional connections with artificial intelligence.
Not since Spike Jonze’s tender “Her” has a film found humanity in the most unexpected places, and “After Yang” not only finds it in artificial intelligence but, of all things, tea.
You can think of a somnambulistic intersection of elements and moods from Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), Alex Garland’s Ex-Machina (2014) and Maria Schrader's I’m Your Man (2021).
Set in the not-so-distant future (similar to Spike Jonze’s Her ), an assistive android named Yang (Justin H. Min, in one of this year’s strongest supporting roles) suddenly malfunctions.
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Dick’s stories tends to arrive on screen dark – Blade Runner , Total Recall , A Scanner Darkly , Minority Report – but director Kogonada decides to go one better than any of those with a film that is almost stygian in its gloom.
“After Yang” is not at all the sophomore feature admirers might have expected from the creator of 2017’s “Columbus,” a well-respected if somewhat stiff examination of relationships, inherited versus organic, which asked audiences to consider architecture and design as crucial components of how people connect.
Pitted next to his 2017 debut feature Columbus, After Yang—screening in the Un Certain Regard sidebar—may seem like a completely different oddball.
After Yang , director Kogonada’s highly anticipated follow up to his 2017 indie darling Columbus , starts with a Jake (Colin Farrell), Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), and their children Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and Yang (Justin H. Min) taking a family photo in a dreamlike setting to make an everlasting memory.
But ever since his directorial debut in 2017 with Columbus , cinephiles have been looking forward to his next project.