Kogonada’s After Yang is the kind of film that lingers not with grand gestures or dramatic crescendos, but with the soft persistence of a question left unanswered. In a cinematic landscape often obsessed with noise, here is a film that finds profundity in silence, in the spaces between words, in the way a synthetic being might blink just a second too long. It’s a sci-fi film stripped of spectacle, a family drama that refuses melodrama, and a philosophical inquiry that never forgets to be deeply human.

The story follows Jake (Colin Farrell) and Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) as they grapple with the sudden malfunction of Yang (Justin H. Min), their adopted robotic "techno-sibling" and cultural guide for their adopted daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). What begins as a repair mission evolves into an existential excavation of Yang’s memories, of what it means to grieve something not quite alive, and of the fragile threads that hold families together.

Kogonada’s direction is deliberate, almost painterly. Every frame feels composed with the precision of a haiku, where emptiness carries as much weight as the subject. The cinematography, awash in muted greens and warm neutrals, mirrors the film’s themes of organic vs. artificial, natural vs. manufactured. There’s a stillness here that could be mistaken for slowness, but patience reveals it as a kind of reverence for the characters, for their quiet sorrow, for the small moments that define a life (or a simulation of one).

Farrell delivers one of his most restrained performances, his weariness and quiet desperation palpable. But it’s Justin H. Min who is the revelation. As Yang, he embodies an eerie, gentle humanity more "real" than the humans around him. His performance asks: Is it the memories that make us, or the way we’re remembered?

The film stumbles only when it leans too heavily into its own lyricism. Some scenes border on self-indulgence, as if Kogonada is too enamored with his own aesthetic to tighten the narrative. A subplot involving a museum curator (a wonderfully understated Haley Lu Richardson) feels slightly undercooked, a missed opportunity to deepen the film’s exploration of legacy.

Yet, these are minor quibbles in a work this delicate, this thoughtful. After Yang doesn’t seek to dazzle or devastate. It asks, softly, what we owe to each other human or not. And in doing so, it leaves an imprint, subtle but indelible.