Film review: After Yang asks interesting questions about our relationship to AI

Pictured: Colin Farrell as Jake, Jodie Turner-Smith as Kyra, Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja as Mika and Justin H Min as Yang. Picture: Photo/Future Autumn LLC/Sky UK Limited/Linda Kallerus

★★★★☆

After Yang (PG) is a sci-fi starring Colin Farrell as Jake, who faces a dilemma when his daughter Mika’s (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) elder sibling Yang (Justin H. Min) stops functioning. 

Yang, we learn, is a type of sophisticated android designed to assist Western couples who adopt Chinese children by providing a link to the baby’s cultural hinterland; now that Mika is fully assimilated, Jake must decide whether or not to have Yang repaired — an expensive business — or simply insist that the family move on without him. 

Adapted from a short story by Alexander Weinstein, and written and directed by Kogonada, After Yang is a subtle sci-fi that asks all manner of interesting questions about our relationship to artificial intelligence. 

The most intriguing question centres on emotional authenticity: does it really matter, in terms of a genuine sense of loss, that Yang is an android? 

Colin Farrell attends the "After Yang" New York Screening at Village East Cinema on February 28, 2022 in New York City.  Picture: Theo Wargo/Getty Images

The answer to that question depends on whether you’re Jake, who has long since adopted a Chinese aesthetic in his home design, or Mika, who has always believed Yang to be real, or Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith), Jake’s wife, a pragmatic woman who is a little impatient of Jake’s inability to make a decision on whether to scrap the obsolete Yang. 

Colin Farrell won the Best Actor award at the recent Venice Film Festival for his performance in the forthcoming Banshees of Inisherin, but he could just as easily have won for this intelligent and delicately nuanced exploration of loss and grief. 

(cinema release)