After Yang brings some robot soul to Sundance

A couple days ago, I wondered aloud if this year’s big acquisition out of Sundance would be Cha Cha Real Smooth, the immensely likable postgraduate comedy written, directed, and starring Cooper Raiff. Perhaps Apple was listening. News broke this morning that the company has purchased Raiff’s film for $15 million, reportedly edging out competing offers from Netflix, Amazon, and Sony. It is, indeed, the biggest sale of the fest—though also a good $10 million shy of what Apple paid last year for CODA, the big jury- and audience-award winner, and a film at least superficially comparable to Cha Cha Real Smooth in its aim to put smiles on faces and send a few tears down them, too.

I have no idea if CODA was “worth” the record-breaking sum spent to acquire it last January. In the streaming era, the metrics we once used to determine that are no longer sufficient. (Would Happy, Texas have been a hit on Hulu?) But the film has found an audience. And it’s doing well with awards voters. This morning brought not just news of this year’s big Sundance sale but also the latest development in the fairy-tale success story of last year’s, with CODA adding nominations from the Producers and Writers Guild to go along with those it’s already picked up from the Screen Actors Guild.

Perhaps that’s the kind of return on investment Apple is seeking with these big acquisitions. I do wonder if Oscar nominations are more valuable for the streaming giants than they ever were for the mini-major studios slowly unrolling their acclaimed indies into various theatrical markets. How many streams and subscribers will the Academy’s stamp of approval buy? Probably more than the tickets Apple would sell if CODA was still making the big-city rounds come the middle of next month.

As with every other aspect of the industry, Sundance and the usual buying spree that comes with it now have to be considered in the broader, pandemic-escalated shift towards home viewing. Maybe it doesn’t matter that neither CODA nor Cha Cha Real Smooth got the packed-auditorium premieres that normally greet a certified Sundance crowdpleaser. After all, many people aren’t going to see them with a packed crowd anyway. Better for buyers, perhaps, to just try to assess how these films play in the vacuum of the home viewing experience—or at least to listen to how virtual audiences are receiving them without the beneficial amplification of a live laugh track or the cast and crew sitting a few rows down in the Eccles.

The delicate virtues of After Yang, a sci-drama from video-essayist and Sundance alum Kogonada, are perfectly accessible from the couch and without an audience punctuating them with audible reactions. (It’s not exactly the kind of movie that pauses for applause or anything.) Still, I wish I could have seen it on the big screen, to better bask in the sleek, ordered beauty of its imagery and be enveloped by the hush of its melancholy world of tomorrow. The film premiered last summer at Cannes, and like Happening—the Venice winner Katie wrote about yesterday—it arrives now in Sundance as part of the invaluable Spotlight program, which rounds up selections from other festivals that might go over well in Park City. That it’s been received slightly better here than it was in Cannes probably says something about both fests.

The film is set in an unspecified, probably not especially distant future when androids have become commonplace and widely available. Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith are a married couple who have acquired one of these so-called “techno sapiens” as a combination babysitter, sibling, and cultural educator for their adopted daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). When Yang (Justin H. Min), as this robot servant is named, suffers a malfunction and falls into a catatonic factory-settings state, Farrell’s emotionally distant father/husband Jake goes to get him fixed—a troubleshooting excursion that becomes an investigation into Yang’s secret origins and the mystery of his artificially intelligent mind.

This is science fiction of the Her variety: more curious than anxious about our relationship to technology, encasing earnest emotional software in a smoothly appealing hardware, set in a world to come that seems credibly futuristic in various details but doesn’t go overboard with them (because, of course, we’re really just seeing a slightly distorted version of now). The special effects are minimally deployed, and in some cases far from remarkable; Yang’s memory bank is uncreatively visualized as a vast virtual field of glowing thumbnails the accessor has to toggle across. In Farrell, who at times seems more robotic than the robot, the film personifies its plan of attack; the star’s apparent emotional distance masks a wealth of concealed feelings.

After Yang flirts with satire, introducing an international webcam dance contest—a plot element that sets an initially oddball tone the film drops almost immediately—and including a funny deadpan scene between Jake and the customer service rep he encounters at the film’s vaguely dystopian version of an Apple Store. Mostly, though, Kogonada is too committed to the film’s soulful sci-fi minimalism and his philosophical aims to take many eccentric detours. There are times when his background in criticism shows, and I’m not just talking about a flashback scene of Jake and Yang discussing a Les Blank movie. Like his lovely directorial debut, the walk-and-talk indie drama Columbus, this conceptually ambitious follow-up has a habit of sussing out its themes aloud; it’s a film about memory and identity that keeps essentially announcing that it’s about memory and identity.

All the same, After Yang got to me. Kogonada communes with the spirit of Ozu in his gorgeous compositions; it’s the kind of film that grabs your heart suddenly at times through nothing more than how it frames the characters in relationship to each other and their environment. And the director locates a very affecting ghost in the machine of his narrative. Yang, originally deployed as a literal educational tool to connect Mika to her Chinese heritage, becomes a walking symbol for the adoption experience; the more of his past “life” Jake uncovers, the more this restrained tearjerker becomes a meditation on how children’s identities are sometimes shaped by both the culture they’re born into and the one in which they’re raised. If After Yang occasionally suggests an essay bent imperfectly into narrative form, some of its numerous ideas are very poignant and its prose is far from mechanical.

As if androids weren’t enough, cloning ends up figuring into the plot as well— though like almost everything else fantastically high concept in After Yang, it’s there mostly to facilitate thematic inquiries. That wondrous advance of science is given a central position in the cleverly titled Dual, though it’s deployed for more than just dramatic ends here, too. Like some accidental instant parody of last month’s Mahershala Ali sci-fi drama Swan Song, this dark comedy from writer-director Riley Stearns (The Art Of Self-Defense) casts Karen Gillan in a, uh, dual role: She plays both Sarah, a rudderless young woman who discovers she has a terminal disease, and Sarah’s Clone, who will take over her life to shelter her mother and boyfriend from grief after she dies. Yet when Sarah beats the impossible odds and goes into remission, she finds herself in the court-mandated position of having to battle her identical genetic double to the death on live television to reclaim her own life.

It took me a while to get on the absurdist wavelength of Dual (whose title, of course, has a dual meaning as well). Part of what stood in my way was Gillan’s deliberately stilted zombie-misfit routine, her lobotomy-patient shtick. It created a tough barrier to entry: If Sarah barely seems to care if she lives or dies, why should I? Whatever laughs her cartoon indifference provoked seem to prevent the film from rising above the level of an overextended sketch, especially once Sarah’s Clone showed up and Gillan’s acting exercise seemed to amount to merely mirroring deadpan with more deadpan.

Yet the performance turns out to be as strategic as Farrell’s chilliness in After Yang. Under the offhand lunacy of its dystopian gag-machine world, Dual is an ultimately rather withering comedy about the soul-sucking disappointment and tedium of everyday life. The ending has real teeth, besides completely subverting whatever appeared to be the arc of the conflict. What’s more, I came around to Stearns’ comic approach. He has a very funny mean streak in him, toying with our emotions during a cleverly resolved scene where Aaron Paul’s self-defense instructor—an apparently mandatory character in this filmmaker’s work—uses his own dog to test Sarah’s killer instincts. Eventually, a Miller analogy popped into my head and wouldn’t leave: Stearns is to Yorgos Lanthimos as Jared Hess is to Wes Anderson.

If Dual slowly won me over, Resurrection upended my expectations rather suddenly, and in a fairly diabolical way. It’s another of this year’s seemingly countless genre selections at Sundance, and for a while, it looks like a fairly familiar game of mounting psychological suspense. Rebecca Hall plays Margaret, a slightly high-strung businesswoman in Albany, New York whose tendency to nervously helicopter parent her 17-year-old daughter (Grace Kaufman) kicks into overdrive when she starts spotting a man from her past (Tim Roth, building quite the late-career portfolio of nasty art thrillers). Who is this mysterious figure and why does his mere appearance send Margaret into a frenzied panic spiral, a meltdown of dread?

Director Andrew Semans lends Resurrection a crisp urgency from the very start; even before anything is officially out of sort, the sinuous glide of the camera and the butcher-knife efficiency of the editing puts us on nerve. Still, by now, festivalgoers should be very familiar with this kind of plummet into Repulsion-style paranoia. It’s when Semans finally reveals his big secret that the movie takes a turn for the singularly lunatic. I won’t even hint at what it is, but it’s deeply, bizarrely disturbing—and somehow made even more so by how the movie unveils it, through a monologue delivered in a bravado single take instead of through the more obvious choice of a flashback.

Resurrection only gets nuttier and gnarlier from here, right up to its deranged big swing of an ending. I’m not entirely convinced it has much to say about motherhood, trauma, abuse, control—really any of the topics it grazes during Margaret’s queasy reckoning with her past. But Hall holds it all together with her quavering conviction. Over the past decade or so, she’s become a patron saint of horror, lending emotional authenticity to ghost stories and yuppie-in-peril thrillers alike. If Resurrection caught me off guard, her gripping volatility at its center couldn’t. She always brings it.