Adapted from Alexander Weinstein's short story "Saying Goodbye To Yang," Kogonada's film is primarily about the evolution of grief in a technologically advanced world. He's made a deceptively small-scale drama where one family's tragedy opens up more existential questions about the very nature of our cherished memories in an age where everything is kept as a memento on our cell phones. Is our relationship to those we've left behind determined entirely by the memories we've created through the photos and videos that we've posed for — images as much for the wider world's benefit as ours? And does our need to create these artificial memories come at the odds of remembering the bigger picture, our thoughts of loved ones eventually replaced by all we have on our camera rolls as time progresses?
The family tragedy here is the death of Yang (Justin H. Min), an artificial babysitter initially bought to help adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) stay attuned to her own Chinese heritage. As she's grown up, she's been constantly fed information about her background and Chinese culture at large — all delivered in a register closer to that of a parent than a sibling, or even an educator. Because of their close relationship, Yang has increasingly been seen by the family as a second adopted son, and is slowly welcomed more into their close bonding time, up to and including the regular dance competitions we see in the opening. When Yang malfunctions one day, immediate efforts to repair him fail, and the family all have to reckon with how their relationships have changed, something which particularly affects Jake. Allowed to hold onto Yang's memories, he finds himself repeatedly diving in, recontextualizing his own memories and discovering that Yang had an equally rich existence before being bought by the family.
The central novelty of "After Yang" is that it's a film set in a world where artificial intelligence in the form of advanced humanoid robots is commonplace, yet achieves profundity through the way it makes us contemplate the realities of living without it. Kogonada separates us from the sleek, distinctively sci-fi future world he's created largely through budgetary necessities; underground highways that connect the family to the city, populated by driverless cars, are shown entirely from inside the vehicle, for example — limiting the audience's perspective of otherworldly creations that might otherwise distract from the emotional resonance. There's every suggestion that a "Blade Runner"-type future may exist in the margins, but the writer/director's focus is entirely on the human story at the core, and refuses to let you get distracted by the wider world. Not since Steven Spielberg's "A.I: Artificial Intelligence" has science fiction world-building existed entirely as a MacGuffin for an innately human story. And here, Kogonada even flips the stereotypical narrative about a robot developing consciousness, with the lessons about what it means to be human taught entirely to the grown man facing up to the loss of his family's artificial babysitter.
