There’s a fundamentally mournful quality to the trailer for After Yang, the latest film from writer-director Kogonada (Columbus). Based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein (from his 2016 collection Children of the New World), the film stars Colin Farrell as Jake, a father seeking to fix his daughter’s robot friend, Yang (Umbrella Academy‘s Justin H. Min).
What’s happened to Yang is unclear, though there’s (maybe?) a suggestion that he’s seeing something the humans can’t see. Jake and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) buy Yang to be a friend to their adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), and to help her connect to her Chinese heritage. When Yang malfunctions, A24’s summary explains, “Jake searches for a way to repair him. In the process, Jake discovers the life that has been passing in front of him, reconnecting with his wife and daughter across a distance he didn’t know was there.”
After Yang also stars Haley Lu Richardson (who was in the director’s Columbus), Sarita Choudhury (Jessica Jones) and Clifton Collins Jr. (Westworld, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World). It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year and recently screened at Sundance, winning the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, which is given to “an outstanding feature film focusing on science or technology as a theme, or depicting a scientist, engineer or mathematician as a major character.”
The Los Angeles Times’ Justin Chang called the movie “a melancholy balm for the moviegoing soul,” which is exactly what the trailer looks like. After Yang will be in theaters and streaming on Showtime on March 4th.
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