After Yang

When his young daughter's beloved companion, an android nanny named Yang, malfunctions, Jake searches for a way to repair it. In the process, he rediscovers the life that has been passing before him as he reconnects with his wife and daughter.

Set in a clean and technologically advanced Day After Tomorrow type future, an interracial American couple has a Chinese transracial adoptee child. Concerned that their child will grow up without really knowing the culture of their birth, they buy a “cultural techno-sapien” (an android built to resemble a young Chinese man) named Yang, not just to care for, and help raise, their daughter, but also to share her birth heritage with her. They all become a family, and their daughter loves Yang very much.

Then Yang breaks down.

When they purchased Yang, he was refurbished, a second-hand android who is now out of date, so fixing him isn’t possible. It’s both a sudden loss, and also a drawn-out one, as a full piece of their family is now gone, after a lingering expectation that they would recover, and the entire family struggles in their own ways with letting him go. Each hunts for options and second opinions, and this path leads them to discover how Yang’s small life outside of them had touched so many others, something they were previously unaware of, and this helps them not just to rediscover their own lives, both with him, but with each other too, but it helps to brings them to a place where they can begin to reach an understanding and acceptance of their grief, where they can begin to heal, and to learn to live with the loss.

It is a sad and also beautiful journey.

After Yang is writer/director Kogonada adapting Alexander Weinstein’s short story “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” a story of life and death and human connection, examining not only the impact a person makes on the world, but the space that they leave behind when they’re gone. While this is certainly a film about grief and loss, as well as what it means to be human, it’s also a film about family, about heritage and culture, also race, both shared and appropriated. It’s about who exactly all of these things belong to, and why, as well as what it means to belong to a certain group, and whether or not being able to even belong is possible for some people.

After Yang is a touching film, musing about love and grief and memories, that’s not interested in providing answers. It exists, and allows itself to just exist, because it’s about the journey, not the ending. Overall, it’s a sweet and melancholic movie, a nice little bit of contemplative sci-fi that will bring a tear to your eye.

In a time now of near-constant and immeasurable loss, as we all find ourselves adrift upon a veritable ocean of grief, as this country’s era staggers and stumbles, slowing as it trudges on to its ignoble end, After Yang is an excellent and cathartic watch, a small salve to the burns we carry.

Big thumbs up.