Kogonada’s After Yang is the latest in a line of science-fiction films that explore the relationship between technology and memory. Based on Alexander Weinstein’s short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the film is about a person accessing another’s subjectivity via recording technologies, and as such recalls everything from Blade Runner to Omar Naim’s unjustly forgotten The Final Cut. The wrinkle here is that After Yang doesn’t leave race out of its sci-fi allegory, introducing anti-racist critique to a genre that’s usually employed to speak much more broadly about the human condition.
The story centers on an interracial couple, Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), who lives in America at some unknown point in the distant future. The world of the film is marked by a more widespread East Asian influence in dress and interior design, presumably because of the ascendancy of China. Individuals can reproduce by cloning, but adopting Chinese children remains common, though no mention is made of the state of more traditional means of reproduction. Like many families, Jake and Kyra have an adopted daughter of Chinese origin, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), along with a “techno-sapien” older brother, Yang (Justin H. Min), that they bought to keep Mika company.
When we first meet the family, they’re assembled for a photo in their verdant, spacious backyard, projecting clean, genuine smiles to the old-fashioned camera that takes their picture. It’s immediately clear that in the film’s future society, coded as “post-racial” by this idealized image of a multiethnic family, hasn’t actually let go of the idea of race.
The industry that encourages parents to purchase an artificial human made to look Chinese and programmed with knowledge about China in order to provide an adopted Chinese baby with companionship raises all kinds of questions about the meaning and cultural capital of being “Chinese” in this world. Allegorically, it refracts the current racist positioning of people of East Asian heritage as somehow robotic—inherently good at math, inextricably beholden to an ingrained program of culture, and so forth. And Yang poses the kinds of questions that post-first-generation Chinese Americans may ask themselves: “Am I really Chinese?” we hear him muse at one point, questioning the authenticity of the identity that he was assigned.
During an off-screen moment, Yang malfunctions, becoming totally unresponsive, and Jake is tasked with finding a way of reactivating him. Rebuffed and overcharged by the future version of the Geek Squad, he pursues more illicit means of diagnosing and hopefully fixing Yang, and ends up with a cube containing the sum of Yang’s memories. Paging through those memories via a pair of futuristic glasses displaying a GUI that suggests an endless universe of rationally ordered, square stars, Jake attempts to reconstruct the android servant that he seems to have never really known, piecing together the fully lived subjectivity that escaped his purview.
In essence, After Yang suggests a spin on “Bicentennial Man,” Isaac Asimov’s classic 1976 novelette about an android that wants to be a human, only the story here has been updated for our digital media age, and ponders how race impacts self-identity. It turns out that Yang displayed the traditional hallmarks of sapience—which isn’t actually that surprising for a type of android referred to within the film as techno-sapiens—like self-questioning, genuine brotherly affection for Mika, and even, potentially, romantic love.
Kogonada brings much poetry to the depiction of Jake coming to identify with Yang. Montages that play with asynchrony and repetition capture the unnatural, mysterious process of coming to inhabit a different position in the world via technology. But after a certain point, the direction of After Yang’s sympathies starts to feel, well, misdirected. As so many of the moments that Jake relives through Yang’s eyes are interactions with Jake himself, it becomes evident that Jake is discovering, belatedly, something that was staring him in the face the whole time. That Yang was, in fact, something like a complete person is a foregone conclusion as soon as Jake’s private investigation begins, but Kogonada draws out Jake’s realization, delivering each stage of the reveal with earnest, sappy strings on the soundtrack.
A man who seems to believe, without significant cognitive dissonance, that Yang is both a family member and a thing he owns comes off as more absurdly, obliviously inhuman than Kogonada acknowledges, especially in the film’s second half, which sticks to the codes of conventional melodrama. Jake learns his lesson, but he’s still very much the center of this story. In this way, After Yang feels regressive in comparison to Blade Runner and “Bicentennial Man,” which, however white-washed they are, trust us to recognize the legitimacy of the other’s being without filtering it solely through the (here, literal) lenses of the ruling class.
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