‘After Yang’ and sci-fi as therapy | review and analysis

After Yang follows a father’s attempts to save his daughter’s robot brother as the family deals with identity, parenthood, and love

After Yang premiered at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. A24 will release it in theaters in March.

At its best, science fiction acts as a meditation on something we know through the lens of the unfamiliar. In After Yang, the second film by writer-director Kogonada, the unfamiliar in this case is artificial intelligence, in the form of possibly the closest we’ll ever get to creating a human from computers — a “techno-sapien” as the film puts it. As for what we know, it’s those many things we’re already intimate with: memories, identity, love; the very fabric of our existence. If those sound like lofty themes, they are. It’s an ambitious movie. But those subjects are tackled with the same quiet sensitivity that Kogonada used to direct his egregiously underseen debut feature Columbus.

The opening shot of the movie is of a quintessential family photo; posing are…