After Yang

Yang version 2.0 will be way better
dir: Kogonada
2022
The future looks pleasant… Easy on the eyes. Very tasteful.
But of course there are still problems, mostly because people are still around.
After Yang is the kind of science fiction flick that people lament doesn’t get made often enough, and then don’t watch because it doesn’t have explosions or guaranteed Hemsworths in it.
It might be set in a brave, new future, but its issues for its characters are still recognisably human ones.
Even if much of the story is about what happens when an android (Justin H. Min) stops working.
There’s a family, made up of Dad (Colin Farrell), Mum (Jodie Turner-Smith) and their adoptive daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja). She is of Chinese extraction, and the parents, feeling an obligation to have her learn about what they see as her culture and heritage, buy a Chinese android they call Yang (Min), to be like a big brother to her, who can tell her all these facts about China, and teach her Mandarin.
Right from virtually the beginning of the film, Yang shuts down, and can’t be restarted. They try switching him on and off, they probably try to reset him to factory settings. They don’t try whacking him on the side of the head, thankfully.
It’s not that subtle, but the family don’t have a lot of money to throw around, can’t afford to officially get him repaired because, hey, he was purchased in a dodgy deal in the first place. The legit people the Dad takes his Yang to get repaired at can’t do anything, the dodgy guy he takes him to can’t really do anything, but he does find something in Yang’s chest that proves what he suspected all along: that someone was spying on him!
You know, as opposed to the slender black objects we all carry in our pockets or bags that tell all sorts of corporations everything we’ve done, said and searched for on any given day. In their future, though, they are beyond such petty devices.