Androids dream of more than electric sheep in the trailer for Kogonada's hit After Yang

One of the more-hyped and well-reviewed movies of last week’s Sundance Film Festival, After Yang stars Colin Farrell in a Her-tinged sci-fi domestic drama about a malfunctioning robot and the little girl that loves it. Video essayist Kogonada’s second feature follows in the quiet, clean-lined minimalism of his first, Columbus, with an added dose of ambition.

The sci-fi reality of After Yang, as depicted in the trailer, shows how far Kogonada is willing to take his interest in how the objects that populate the lives of humans change and grow with them. Columbus looked at the spaces we inhabit, and After Yang explores the artificial intelligence we’re welcoming into our lives. The change hasn’t affected the volume of Kogonada’s work. Everyone’s still talking at a level just above a whisper in After Yang, too.

The movie stars Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith as a married couple looking to repair their “techno-sapien,” Yang (Justin H. Min). Yang is more than an upgraded Furby. It acts as a quasi sibling to their young daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), who has grown attached to Yang and would appreciate its repair. So it’s off to the near-future Genius Bar for Farrell, who learns there’s more to owning a robot than he anticipated.

The movie was one of our favorites from this year’s Sundance. Our film editor A.A. Dowd wrote:

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.

After Yang will hit theaters and streaming on Showtime on March 4.