Cannes 2021: The Souvenir Part II, After Yang, Ahed’s Knee, Lingui | Festivals & Awards

In contrast to Hogg, the filmmaker Kogonada is unlikely ever to make a sequel to “Columbus,” his 2017 debut feature. Part of the originality of that film derived from its unusual location: Columbus, Indiana, a small city that became an oasis of modernist architecture. The setting could be reused, but in any practical sense, “Columbus” was a one-off, an experiment that can’t be replicated.

And to his credit, Kogonada is unafraid to go far in another direction with his second feature, “After Yang,” which is science fiction. Certain shots are clearly the work of the same filmmaker, and his characters again find themselves pondering philosophical questions about the nature of time, say, and what distinguishes somethingness from nothingness. But it’s a much more narrative-driven film.

Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith play Jake and Kyra, the parents of a girl named Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). When they adopted her, to keep her in touch with her Chinese heritage, they purchased what the movie calls a “techno sapien”: an artificial human named Yang (Justin H. Min), whom they raised as Mika’s older brother. But now Yang has fritzed out, and it seems repairs aren’t possible. He’ll start to decompose soon if he isn’t fixed. (Evidently, these techno sapiens are something like the original Terminators—machines surrounded by living tissue.)

But attempts to revive Yang raise questions about his true nature. Was he spying on the family? Which memories did his circuitry deem worthy of preserving? Did he have emotional capacities and secrets that the rest of the family never knew about? 

Rave reviews seem to be proliferating for “After Yang,” which premiered tonight in Un Certain Regard. But I’ll confess, as someone who was disarmed and fascinated by “Columbus,” to finding the new movie underwhelming. Kogonada uses a lot of showy formal strategies to disguise familiar elements of the central premise. He keeps the camera in long shot, shifts aspect ratios to differentiate perspectives, and finds framings that emphasize the cluttered sets—which in the film’s future setting probably qualify as retro-modernist, and certainly look like callbacks to the scenery in Columbus, Indiana. (The wonderful production design is by Alexandra Schaller.) Theme music by Ryuichi Sakamoto is soothing without being too syrupy.