Stream It Or Skip It: ‘After Yang’ on Showtime, a Quietly Disarming Sci-fi Tale Set in a More Hopeful Than Dreadful Future

After Yang – debuting simultaneously on Showtime and in theaters – may test our capacity for emo-contemplative A.I.-sci-fi thinkdramas. We’ve had our share of them in recent years, be they tinged with melancholy or malevolence, and director Kogonada’s (Columbus) adaptation of a short story by Alexander Weinstein skews heavily to the former. So don’t be surprised if you fire this one up and maybe end up pondering the nature of grief or the concept of mortality. Hooray?

AFTER YANG: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: It looks like the kind of future humankind would enjoy if selfless and empathetic people were in charge: Less noise, clutter and consumption, lots of natural light, trees and greenery everywhere, harmony among people of different cultures and skin color, etc. So this isn’t a dystopia, although it smells ever-so-slightly of unease, because there are clones now, and artificial intelligence has progressed to the point where its toes hang off the ledge over the fathomless yawp of sentience. Jake (Colin Farrell), Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) and Yang (Justin H. Min) are a tight, loving, twenty-whateverth-century family. Jake and Kyra adopted Mika, then purchased Yang – a “technosapien” who looks just like a living, breathing person – to be a nanny of sorts. Yang can not only pour her a bowl of Froot Loops if Froot Loops existed in this time (I don’t think they do; seems like a reality where high fructose corn syrup is banned), but he also has Chinese physical characteristics, and helps her get in touch with her cultural heritage by doling out what the family lovingly/jokingly calls “Chinese fun facts.”

The movie opens with a family portrait. Yang sets the timer on an antique camera and the rest of the fam calls him up to stand next to him. Despite his being a piece of highly advanced technology, he’s very much like a brother or son, something Alexa can only dream of being, although one hopes to hell that Alexa can’t dream yet. We get a wonderfully funny sequence in which the four participate in a tightly choreographed dance to uptempo techno music, part of what appears to be a global virtual competition. Their coordination disharmonizes to the point where they’re eliminated, and everyone stops their weirdo shuck-and-jive, except Yang. He keeps going and going. He must have blown a flywheel pinvalve or something. They’re all concerned, but Mika’s understandably very upset.

Jake tosses Yang over his shoulder to take him to be repaired. Problem is, the family doesn’t have a lot of money. Jake owns an organic tea shop that brings the word “artisanal” to its most grossly twee extreme, and we get a couple of scenes in which he sits at the counter and nobody ever comes in to buy anything. They purchased Yang as a refurbished model from a second-rate store that no longer exists, so pursuing the warranty is moot, and the primary dealers will only accept Yang as a trade-in for a new model and recycle the body – thus proving that the damn home-appliance business hasn’t changed a bit in however many years. So Jake takes Yang to a shady conspiracy-theorist repairman who plucks a chip from the android and claims Yang’s been spying on them for the benefit of corporate overlords, and this is when we sigh and go, great, this is actually a hellish-dystopia movie.

But maybe it’s not! Jake seeks a second opinion, and finds out that that little chip is quite the philosophical and existential can of worms. Meanwhile, we spot a blond woman (Haley Lu Richardson) poking around the house, looking for something, Yang perhaps. A bunch of wistful flashbacks reveal that Yang was a lovely, lovely… person? Or what? And we also get a scene in which we learn that, in this timeline, a German filmmaker, who goes unnamed, made a documentary about a man searching for the best tea in all of China, and Colin Farrell does a spectacular Werner Herzog voice when he quotes it. And here’s where I assert that any reality in which Herzog made a movie about tea could possibly be a dystopia.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The usual Thoughtful Sci-Fi suspects: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, Her, Swan Song, Ex Machina, I’m Your Man and the O.G. bummer brainbender, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. But mostly Her.

Performance Worth Watching: Between this, The Lobster and the emotional vulnerable scenes in In Bruges, Colin Farrell low-key has become one of Hollywood’s best muted, understated sad-boy actors.

Memorable Dialogue: Upon analyzing the Quasi-Herzog’s tea movie, Yang gets disarmingly poetic: “Do you believe it? That a cup of tea can contain a world? That you can taste a place and time?”

Sex and Skin: None. The movie never gets into the functionality and/or existence of Yang’s anatomy.

Our Take: It feels nice, for a change, to imagine a future in which humans don’t go extinct, and apparently managed to do enough responsible things to prevent planetary destruction. That might be what lends After Yang its fable-like traits, and if that statement sounds a mite cynical, well, that’s intentional here in the crush of 2022. The world Kogonada creates is ever so slightly more u-tope than dys-tope, for reasons that have less to do with the way it functions socially and politically – the movie’s insular, set almost wholly within Jake’s family’s sphere, leaving larger governance in question – and more for the implications spinning from third-act revelations. Revelations that I won’t discuss, beyond the fact that they land like feathers floating gently into our upturned hands.

So those who prefer whopper twists and mindblowing kablams over the tonal equivalent of a long, warm hug while you cry quietly, be warned. Kogonada’s goal is to practice dramatic restraint and hide revelatory nuggets about the state of things inside details – e.g., the wariness bordering on prejudice some characters express about clones and technosapiens, because humans will forever be human. He introduces ideas about curiosity and voyeurism, the ethereal and the concrete, fear and acceptance, the nature of memory and psychological growth. Sometimes the movie’s surprisingly funny, sometimes its constancy squashes the melodrama flat, but most often it’s meditative, subtly mesmerizing and even oddly comforting, considering it’s essentially about the singularity. We’ve seen enough bleak, on-the-nose, future-set parables and cautionary tales, so Kogonada’s gentle, compassionate, humanist tack is refreshing.

Our Call: STREAM IT. After Yang foregoes the usual sci-fi M.O.s for a 60/40 heartfelt/smart drama that softly and gently whispers deep thoughts in our ears.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.