Random Accessed Memories

A family finds out their robot had feelings too.

- ALISON WILLMORE

THE FUTURE LOOKS quietly but unmistakably Asian in After Yang. It looks that way in a lot of films, and it’s usually also dystopian, dense, and grimy, lit by neon hanzi or, in one of the most famous images in Blade Runner (and movies in general), a luminous geisha smiling down on a gloomy neo–Los Angeles. Western filmmakers who have found the details of present-day eastern cities exotic enough to repurpose them and create a sense of temporal distance have, consciously or not, made those borrowed trappings a symptom of societies becoming more callous and crowded, more foreign, while centering on main characters who invariably are not. The imagination can accommodate a shift in the cultural baseline, can even find cool in it, as long as it’s understood to signify a loss of soul.

But the sun-dappled exurban setting of After Yang, the exquisite new film from writer-director Kogonada, is awash in natural textures as much as new technology. It is such an inverse of a warrenlike sci-fi megalopolis that it would come across as a rebuke if the movie showed any inclination to argue. The general Asian inflection of its near future is intensely lived-in and unfussy: Its characters wear mandarin collars and