Editor’s Note: Vanyaland Film Editor Nick Johnston is here in Boston, but his heart is in Utah as he remotely covers the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Sundance is a virtual edition, but that’s not stopping the film premieres from flowing. Check out our official Sundance preview, scan through all our Sundance 2022 reviews as they are published, and check out our full archives of past festivals.
While the world’s been bickering about the rise of “elevated” horror thanks to the breakthroughs of boutique producer-distributors like A24 and Neon, an equally-as-frustrating development has emerged in Sci-Fi, a genre that often intersects with horror but mostly runs parallel to it. Call it anesthei-fi, where the primary function of the subgenre is to both suggest greater meaning and plausibility through its high-art design while still delivering the same old greeting-card banalities through a heavy-handed parable. One could point the finger at these same culprits (though A24 bats about .500, where every Equals is offset by a masterpiece like Under the Skin), as is with the case of Kogonada’s After Yang, the Columbus director’s second release, but it’s a more general phenomenon than that. If every sci-fi era has its particular design ethos, ours has been wholly consumed by the clean and plant-life covered aesthetic of the Instagram influencer’s tiny house, where technology governs all but is only lightly glimpsed: it is a submission to the real rather than a fictional reality informed by it. Perhaps this is why the cyberpunk design ethos — once consigned to the dustbin of truly devoted fans alongside steampunk — has returned in some circles. If the world is going to hell, at least it can be honest about it.
Then again, After Yang wants you to realize its relevance quickly: The first section of the film is a pointed reminder to always read the fine terms of buying something “certified refurbished,” no matter if it’s a dust-filled gaming console that might burn down your house at the first sign of a power surge or an android companion you’ve bought second-hand in order to better connect your adopted daughter with her heritage. This is the dilemma that Jake (Colin Farrell) and Tyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) find themselves in when, in the middle of participating in a nightly nationwide dance competition (yes, Oscar Isaac in Ex Machina, watch out), their “robo-sapien” companion Yang (Justin H. Min) collapses, terrifying their daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). Jake vows to get her pseudo-brother fixed as soon as he can, but the store that he purchased Yang at closed down in the interim. The robot equivalent of the Genius Bar is no help, so the distraught dad takes the advice of a neighbor (Clifton Collins, Jr.) and heads to a back-alley repairman (Ritchie Coster) to see what he can do. Buried within Yang, it turns out, is a memory module: he’s been able to record the family the whole time, and learn from those bits and pieces in time.
This discovery causes the repairman — a conspiracy theorist — to go apeshit, and also attracts the attention of a robo-sapian scholar and museum-owner (Sarita Choudhury), who wants to both study Yang and put him on display. But, as Yang begins to decompose, Jake journeys into the robot’s memories and begins to realize that he might have lived more of a life than the family every knew, especially with one Grimes-looking clone (Haley Lu Richardson) that lives nearby. So, based on all this, you should know what about to expect: Typically sensitive and great work from Farrell, who has, in his middle period, realized his softness is more of an asset to cinema than his anger ever was; Malickian montages of memory snippets, scored to sad music; and well-composed photography chimeric in its aspect ratios, in service of a perfectly flat aesthetic. It is, functionally, a nice film, but in a slightly empty way, as if it’s missing some sort of central bitterness that could tamper down the saccarine nature of Kogonada’s message, and a few lines about cultural bias against clones and/or robots having their own set of slurs by which the ignorant refer to them don’t necessarily create a flesh and blood world.
To be fair, it’s also kind of hard for me not to empathize with the complaints of the conspiracy theorist here: Most things are already recording us, but typically I know that they’re not attached to a flesh-and-blood machine capable of backfiring and potentially causing greivous harm to a family (just watch Chopping Mall, for Christ’s sakes). It feels like there’s a corporation-sized hole in the middle of the film, where either the company that makes the robo-sapiens are successfully protected by their personhood. They’re objects of study (and I will say that Choudhury’s Bodies-style exhibition of robot bodies is a really cool setting), whose processes are unknown to even the folks tasked with understanding them, despite being the equivalent of a conscious smartphone. Perhaps if Kogonada was more interested in developing the relationships between his characters beyond one-note conversations with Yang that act like de facto therapy sessions — say, like Spike Jonze was in Her — one might be able to forgive these feints at cultural important, but After Yang is ultimately too slight to be anything more than an assemblage of occasionally pretty pictures and a good Colin Ferrell performance. In short: the primary mode of anesthei-fi remains unchallenged and as boring as it ever was.