"After Yang": Human and Humane

How Kogonada's "After Yang" uses the artificial to explore — and celebrate — what it is to be human.

After Yang, Screenplay & dir. Kogonada (2021)

As a critic, I sometimes have to work against the distancing effect that the analytical mind brings into the cinema. Usually, film analysis blends seamlessly into the viewing experience, but it can sometimes be a hindrance. I occasionally find myself distracted from the film by mentally reworking an opening sentence of the inevitable review, or trying to remember if the shot in front of me is called a Dutch angle or an oblique something. And then there are those films that sneak up on you, sliding past your higher cognitive faculties, to hit you right in the heart and sweep you away in their narrative flow. The opening moments of After Yang filled me with so much joy that I was instantly sucked into its world.

The sci-fi trappings of that world are remarkably easy to articulate and, for the first-time viewer, easy to understand. In the near-future, lifelike androids are sold to families as “siblings” designed to educate children. Jake and Ky…