AFTER YANG

AFTER YANG stars Colin Farrell in a slow-moving science fiction drama about a father who tries to fix his adopted young daughter’s android companion but finds more than he expected. AFTER YANG moves too slowly and is too indirect and subdued, but it does tell a pro-family story with a positive father figure and little objectionable content.

Set sometime in a near future, the movie opens on a small middle-class family. Jake, the father, and his wife, Kyra, are upset when their adopted young Chinese daughter, Mika’s, older-looking android “brother,” Yang, suddenly stops working. Yang is a previously owned “techno sapien,” or android, that Jake and Kyra bought to help teach Chinese culture to Mika and befriend her. It’s now up to Jake to find a way to repair Yang.

The family bought the android from a company that sells second-hand android companions. Sadly, Jake finds out the company is no longer in business. Meanwhile, Mika is crying for her parents to repair her friend.

Jake’s neighbor, George, connects him with a man who works on androids in his garage. The android specialist claims the corporations use androids as spyware, collecting data on everything they see. He says Yang is beyond repair but is willing to take the android off Jake’s hands. He extracts the android’s memory cube for Jake to examine before that happens.

Jake consults a nearby museum of artificial intelligence (AI) machines, devices and techno sapiens. A woman there gives Jake a device to examine Yang’s memories in his memory cube. She promises to keep Yang from decomposing while Jake decides whether the museum can put Yang’s body on display.

As Jake begins to “read” Yang’s memories, he discovers surprising facts about Yang and his previous owners. Among them are that Yang became friends with a young blonde woman working at a nearby coffee shop. Jake also learns how much Mika meant to Yang.

AFTER YANG tells a pro-family story with little objectionable content. Jake’s investigation of Yang and his memories brings him closer to his wife and daughter, and to Yang. It also allows him to feel more strongly what Yang’s loss meant to them all. Finally, it deepens Jake’s understanding of Yang’s world and the world of other techno sapiens like Yang. However, AFTER YANG moves at a glacier pace and is too subdued, with few dramatic moments. That said, the little girl in the movie is very cute. There’s also a fun scene where Yang and the family take part in a wild dance competition over what passes for television in the future. It’s like watching an elaborate and frenzied, but hypnotic, dance sequence on TikTok.

AFTER YANG has a few obscenities and two light profanities. Also, there’s a discreet scene where Jake and his wife are putting on their clothes, presumably after engaging in marital sex. Finally, in one scene, Yang and Jake’s wife, Kyra, discuss the possibility of life after death. Yang decides he’s been programmed not to believe in it, but that Kyra has been programmed to believe. This conversation implies, ever so slightly, that a God exists, but nothing further is said about the subject. Ultimately, AFTER YANG doesn’t really resolve any of its philosophical issues about life, human nature or the nature of artificial intelligence. MOVIEGUIDE® advises caution for older children because of the foul language and the movie’s slow and deliberate filmmaking style, which probably won’t interest younger people.