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What makes this film different?

No spoilers? That will be hard.

Suppose a close relative has died. You are close enough to be part of the family crew that is tasked with cleaning out the home and making final disposal of the debris field of a long life. In the back closet, you discover an old box of photographs. Some you recognize, and these tug at your mystic chords of memory. You smile, you wipe away a tear, you go on.

Other photographs recall half-forgotten uncles, aunts and old friends that you've not thought of for many years. You realize that even if a photograph is not of interest to you, it may well have meaning for someone else, and you feel some obligation to at least make an effort to reach out.

But then ... you also find photographs, and a lot of them, of a surprising and quite unlikely person that you never knew existed. This person was obviously important in your family member's life, but you never had a clue. And when you realize that some of these photos are quite recent and some have even been taken inside your current home ... well, now you have a mystery to unravel.

The "photographs" in After Yang are memory snips, a few seconds each day, of things the robot thought were meaningful enough to record. You never realized you were being recorded. What about you did it find important? What do the photographs and the implied hierarchy of meaning say about the inner life of the robot? What does the sudden shift to a third party perspective remind you of what you used to be, and what you may have lost? This ain't just about the bot.

In Kogonada's first film, Columbus, there is a line: "effort plus cost to see things that are invisible and always visible." That sounds cryptic and pretentious here, but in the context of the film, it's fine; Jin and Casey are trying to decipher marginal notes and an enigmatic sketch in a notebook belonging to Jin's father, a distinguished architectural critic who has fallen into a coma. Jin is stranded in town, a stranger in a strange land, because he is doing a deathwatch over his father. Casey is a local. (The plot is straightforward enough; it's an odd couple pairing, using a shared interest in architecture to develop a friendship.) It takes awhile to figure out what is going on because Kogonada never lectures; he just poses the questions and invites the viewer to engage and think. But eventually you realize that the things that are invisible yet always visible are the things that are defined by their absence. The absence can be felt, and the absence has contours that can be seen in the objects that are visible to us. It's brilliantly done. The architectural search, of course, is a metaphor for Jin and Casey's emotional journies; their wandering about town is about a lot more than architecture, though it takes them a long time to admit it. And just for the record, a romance does NOT happen. Kogonada would never go there.

In After Yang, the memories show up as flashes of light surrounded by darkness. The challenge is to explore the darkness. And again, Kogonada will never lecture. He poses the questions. He gives us a glimpse of a data point, a memory. What it means, the viewer had to figure out.

The movie is a philosophical meditation set within a sci-fi story. Did the robot have real feelings? Did the robot want to be human? The questions are implied but not answered. The thing to recognize, however, is that the robot is first and foremost a mirror. The robot is not really the subject of the film; the subject is the human family and that story is very complex. This is family drama and a meditation on memory, loss and love. That is why, in my book, this is a profoundly conservative film. It's not really a technology flick about a dead robot. The bot is a narrative device.

Hey, this is A24. If viewers know what they're getting when they sit down to watch the film, the people at A24 think they've failed. This fits perfectly with Kogonada's style of introspection and open ended questioning.

It's an interesting film. I can't think of a close parallel. And just when you think you've got the film doped out, the bottom falls out again. The most enigmatic line, towards the end, "I always helped." No spoilers here, but After Yang could be both a love story and a ghost story, metaphorically speaking. But it's Kogonada 2.0; he leaves you wondering. People who need their films wrapped up tightly with a bow on top may not like the open-ended questions. I do.

If this intrigues you, read a few reviews, buy a ticket and see it in the theater. If you think this sounds like indie navel gazing, wait a year until it rolls around on your streamer for free. But make a note to check it out then. It may surprise you.

You observed that explorations of the “humanity” of AIs has been done many times and asked what makes this film different.

I just tripped over this review, which begins with precisely the same question and provides a pretty good answer:

https://www.flickeringmyth.com/2022/01/2022-sundance-film-festival-review-after-yang/

In his first two films, Kogonada has emerged as a director with a very distinctive, perhaps unique, voice. It will not be to everyone’s taste, but obviously a lot of folks find it interesting. Columbus elicited much film theory-type discussion about Kogonada’s use of mirrors, windows and reflections. He’s doing the same thing in After Yang. A fritzed out AI and the exploration of its memory bank is the narrative thread around which the film is organized, but Yang is not really the subject of the film. Yang is essentially a mirror. The film is about the family to which Yang had belonged. And Ada, the most enigmatic figure in the film, who is the gateway to much more. It’s done mostly with hints and open questions for the viewers to consider.

The question of whether Yang ever wanted to be human is asked directly. Of the characters we meet in the film, Ada probably knew Yang best, and her answer was no. But it gets a lot more complicated than that. Kogonada never lectures or forces a conclusion. He is content to whisper the question.