96 min | PG | March 4, 2022 | A24
In a near future where families keep AI siblings, a malfunctioning android named Yang shuts down for good. A father tries to repair him and instead finds a hidden archive of memories. The machine, it turns out, was paying closer attention than the humans were.
Jake runs a tea shop and lives with his wife Kyra and their adopted daughter Mika. The family bought Yang, a “technosapien,” to give Mika a connection to her Chinese heritage and a sibling who looks like her. When Yang stops functioning, Jake hunts for a repair and stumbles into Yang’s memory bank instead. Kogonada uses that premise to ask what a life adds up to and who gets to decide whether an artificial one counts. The film is about grief, but it is really about attention. It argues that loving someone means noticing them, and that the android did the noticing this family forgot to do.
Colin Farrell plays Jake with a stillness that reads as decency and avoidance at the same time. He is a man who outsourced his daughter’s emotional life to a machine and now has to reckon with what the machine saw. Justin H. Min plays Yang in fragments, mostly through recovered memories, and builds a full interior from glances and small gestures. Jodie Turner-Smith plays Kyra as a working mother held at a distance by her own exhaustion. Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja plays Mika with the raw confusion of a child who has lost the one person who explained her to herself. Haley Lu Richardson appears in Yang’s memories as Ada and gives the recovered footage its ache.
Kogonada writes and directs with the patience of someone who trusts the image to carry meaning. The production design imagines a future of natural fibers and warm wood rather than chrome, and the costuming dresses the family in soft layers that make the technology feel domestic. The memory sequences are the film’s formal heart. Yang’s recollections appear as a constellation of tiny floating moments, and the editing lets Jake drift through them the way a person sifts a photo album. Aska Matsumiya’s score stays quiet and lets the sound design hold long pauses where a louder film would cue an emotion.
The film resists the easy version of its own story. It does not stage a debate about whether Yang has a soul. It simply shows a being who collected the world with care and lets the family decide what that means. The reserve will keep some viewers at arm’s length, and the pace asks for surrender rather than attention. What Kogonada delivers is a meditation on memory that earns its melancholy. It looks at a machine and finds a model for how to be present, then quietly indicts the humans who could not manage it.