The Soulful Sci-Fi of “After Yang”

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Based on a 2016 short story by Alexander Weinstein, After Yang directed by South Korean-born American filmmaker Kogonada explores a new take on sci-fi’s eternal Turing question: Can a robot have a soul? Do androids dream?

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“A lot of times when a story deals with this kind of subject matter, it’s about an AI wanting to be human,” the director told Deadline. “But in this case, it’s about a human trying to make sense of the loss and value of a non-human being.”

The film stars Colin Farrell as Jake, the father of an adopted Chinese girl who buys an android (Yang) to teach his daughter about Asian culture. But when the android breaks, Jake finds himself considering more than just the cost of repair.

“It’s not a science-fiction film that’s concerned with hovercraft and lasers and space travel,” Farrell says in the film’s production notes. “It’s grounded in a world that should be recognizable to all of us. We talked about it being on the brink of some cataclysmic global climate event, which led a return to a hybrid of urban and rural. It had taken hold within the cities of the world, where people had started growing their own crops on rooftops.”

Uniquely for a film set decades from now, After Yang takes place mostly in a family’s home: around the kitchen table, in low-lit bedrooms and hallways. This lo-fi aesthetic, reminiscent of Jean-Luc Goddard’s Alphaville (1965) by way of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is part of what makes the film so appealing.

More than one article on the production’s design has pointed out Kogonada’s use of “geometric shapes, stacked boxes, and asymmetrical lines to add warmth and definition to the family's open floor plan.” Slashfilm continues,

“He also uses meticulous composition and deliberate blocking to enhance the characters and their journeys; in one deep focus shot that takes place in a dimly lit, backroom chop shop, Jake steps from the farthest reaches of the frame into darkness in the foreground as he tacitly agrees to continue down the path he's on.”

Kogonada, who made the equally exquisite 2017 indie Columbus, “loves a wide shot that reveals the architecture of his spaces, allowing characters to creep into the frame almost surreptitiously,” purrs Thrillist “It's a style that matches the way Konogada unravels the layers of Yang's history, opening up doors that Jake and Kyra never knew existed… Like Columbus, After Yang uses minimalism and architectural spaces to craft a detailed, serene, and lush atmosphere that feels immensely warm despite appearing to be cold and distant at first glance.”

Cinematographer Benjamin Loeb (Mandy, Pieces of a Woman), recalls bonding with the director over their mutual love of medium and wide shots, especially those by the master Japanese filmmaker Yasujiro Ozu.

 “We talked a lot about the relationship between emotions, human beings, and space,” he says in the film’s notes. “I’ve been in a lot of situations where a director will say, ‘This is an emotional moment so we need to be close on the face so we can see the eyes,’” Loeb says. “To the contrary, that actually harms the scene in some ways. Body language, emptiness, clutter—that’s really how my conversations with Kogonada sparked.”

Loeb reveals he was a late addition to the film’s production, telling Filmmaker that in a phone interview with Kogonada “we spoke for hours about everything but the movie. We connected on the topic of emptiness or absence in cinema, as well as space and its relationships to human beings and how it relates to emotions. I think we both just felt like this was a conversation we wanted to keep having, and the next week I was hired.” 

After Yang delicately observes the relationship between humanity and technology. In this world, advanced technology, like self-driving vehicles and ‘techno-sapien’ androids robots purchased as live-in babysitters, and nature have been weaved together to create a space where androids and humans can coexist. Here, people aren’t only dependent on technology, but literally consider it to be vital members of a family.

By all accounts Kogonada enjoys an encyclopedic love of movies has previously crafted short essay-films, many of which can be found in the supplemental features of the Criterion Collection, focusing on directors as varied as Wes Anderson, Terrence Malick, Darren Aronofsky, Hirokazu Kore-eda and Federico Fellini.

In After Yang, he buried some easter eggs for just for cinefiles. Among them: Jake quotes a passage from an obscure 2007 documentary, All in This Tea, directed by Les Blank and Gina Leibrecht, during which Farrell gives a Werner Herzog impression. (

“Colin actually has a top-shelf-level impersonation of Herzog that he determined he had to bring down a notch, because someone like Jake wouldn’t have it,” Kogonada reveals. “It’s his half-Herzog.”

A recurring song in the film is ‘Glide’ from 2001 cult Japanese film All About Lily Chou-Chou while a theme by Oscar-winning composer Ryuichi Sakamoto (The Last Emperor) forms part of the score.

He also tonally references Ozu’s classic Tokyo Story saying, “One of the many things I love about [the film] is that it’s partly about the devastation of the city after the firebombings of World War II. 100,000 dead. A million homeless. None of this devastation is ever mentioned, nor do we see much of postwar Tokyo. But the film is haunted by a profound sense of loss. It’s a ghost story disguised as a family drama.”