"A Big Bold Beautiful Journey" Is None of Those Things Kogonada's fantasy film, starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie, suggests that a great directorial talent is losing his way. In Kogonada's new film, Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie try gamely to overcome the thinness with which their characters have been imagined. If movies were given scores as figure skaters are, fantasy would start with a high rating for technical difficulty. The landings of the genre are hard to stick, because fantasy, by definition, isn't rooted in experience. No one has lived on a distant planet, in the far future, or any place where dragons or wizards rule--so, kudos to anyone who can make such realms feel truly lived in.

I'm writing this post from the guest room in my mom's house, which is peppered with old knick-knacks of mine--to summon the spirit of my childhood room, I suppose. While flipping through my photo albums, I was tickled to find a blurry picture of the poster for Phone Booth, clearly taken by me on a disposable camera outside of a movie theater. I was probably too young to be watching a gunman thriller--thanks, Mom--but I'm pretty sure my affection for it had a lot to do with Colin Farrell, who was a relative unknown when that movie came out in 2002. To this day, I'm a bit gaga over him, though I think part of the reason my puppy love has turned into something more enduring is that, as I've gotten older and my tastes have evolved, so has the actor's persona. Not to downplay his macho heartthrob phase in the aughts--I still go catatonic whenever I think about him salsa dancing in Miami Vice, and I sense noted MV-heads Bilge and David feel the same way--but it has been a delight to see him take on increasingly stranger, more cerebral roles for directors like Yorgos Lanthimos and Sofia Coppola while also pushing himself, unafraid to get ugly and unhinged, in blockbusters like The Batman.

Kogonada's enigmatic sci-fi drama channels Charlie Kaufman and Philip K Dick as Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner Smith try to fix the faulty AI bot they bought for their adopted daughter After Yang is an enigmatic sci-fi drama about a family of the future whose AI robot child (a "techno-sapien") bought by the parents to be a kindly big brother to their adopted Chinese daughter, goes wrong and cannot be fixed. There are touches of Philip K Dick and even Charlie Kaufman, and this is also a pregnant meditation on grief, loss, memory and consciousness. Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith play Jake and Kyra, who have an adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) – and also AI bot Yang (Justin H Min), a happy, calm, friendly and very lovable figure of Chinese appearance, programmed with Chinese memories and Chinese knowledge, whom the family has grown to love. When Yang goes into an unexplained coma, it is deeply upsetting: a bereavement-shock far beyond the malfunction of some gadget. Yang was bought secondhand, without guarantee, so Jake is forced to take him to a rackety backstreet repairman who reveals that Yang had been implanted with spyware designed to harvest consumer data, but also that much of Yang's memory had been recorded.

This entirely absorbing movie from Korean-American director Kogonada is adapted from a short story by Alexander Weinstein in his collection Children of the New World; it floats on a Zen updraft of wisdom and ideas. After Yang is an enigmatic sci-fi drama about a family of the future whose AI robot child (a "techno-sapien") bought by the parents to be a kindly big brother to their adopted Chinese daughter, goes wrong and cannot be fixed. There are touches of Philip K Dick and even Charlie Kaufman, and this is also a pregnant meditation on grief, loss, memory and consciousness. Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith play Jake and Kyra, who have an adopted daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) – and also AI bot Yang (Justin H Min), a happy, calm, friendly and very lovable figure of Chinese appearance, programmed with Chinese memories and Chinese knowledge, whom the family has grown to love. When Yang goes into an unexplained coma, it is deeply upsetting: a bereavement-shock far beyond the malfunction of some gadget.

A version of this article was published in TIME's newsletter Into the Metaverse. You can find past issues of the newsletter here. Technology and fiction have long shared a symbiotic relationship. Just as writers dreamed up fantastical worlds based on imagined technologies, those same worlds have inspired engineers, technologists, and scientists--spurring breakthroughs as well as thorny philosophical questions about their work. The term "metaverse" itself comes from Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash; the comic strip Dick Tracy inspired the cell phone.

Since long before Philip K. Dick wondered if androids dream of electric sheep, science fiction writers have used artificial life as a means to ponder what it means to be human. As a "cultural techno" purchased by an American couple, a white father (Colin Farrell) and Black mother (Jodie Turner-Smith), his job is to impart a sense of Asian identity to their adopted Chinese daughter (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), a purpose for which his memory banks have been filled with "fun facts" about ancient traditions of horticulture and tea-drinking. But Yang (Justin H. Min) finds himself wondering, right up to the edges of what his programming will allow, whether possessing that knowledge is the same as being a part of the culture it describes. He never questioned whether he was human, another character says of Yang, but "he did question if he was Chinese." After Yang's writer-director is surrounded by plenty of questions himself.

Comparisons between Kogonada's new film, "After Yang," and his earlier one, "Columbus," are inevitable, and their differences obscure the big idea that unites them. "After Yang" is a science-fiction film, set in a vague future time at an unspecified place, seemingly in the United States; its title character is an android, or "technosapien." "Columbus," his first feature, from 2017, is set in its own present day, in the real-life city of Columbus, Indiana, and centered on a young woman played by Haley Lu Richardson. "After Yang" is a synthetic work of dystopian imagination, and "Columbus" is a carefully realistic view of its place and time. Nonetheless, the two films are propelled by the same impulse: the artistic basis of mental life, the politics of aesthetics.

"After Yang," the second feature by Kogonada, takes place in a speculative future that looks uncannily like our listless present, with holograph-like phone calls that resemble Zoom and domestic interiors that could have been lifted from an Architectural Digest slide show. The technology has improved in this world, populated with clones and friendly robots known as "technosapiens," which are practically indistinguishable from biological humans. Looming in the background is the hint that some catastrophic geopolitical conflict has ignited between China and the U.S., but the central crisis of the film takes place much closer to home. Based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein, "After Yang" follows the everyday lives of a couple, Jake and Kyra (Colin Farrell and Jodie Turner-Smith), and their beloved technosapien, Yang (Justin H. Min), whom they purchase to help their adopted daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), connect to her Chinese heritage. Early on, however, Yang starts to malfunction--suddenly glitching in the living room, in the middle of a multiplayer game reminiscent of Dance Dance Revolution.

In the film After Yang, a father goes to great lengths to save his daughter's best friend. It just so happens this bestie is a humanoid robot, or technosapien, named Yang. Can he be easily replaced, and what's the value of his artificial life? Like a cross between Black Mirror and Spike Jonze's Her, After Yang explores humanity and existence through the lens of technology, while director Kogonada (Columbus) crafts a vision of the future that feels truly distinct. After a virtuoso opening sequence, where families compete in a virtual dance contest in their living rooms, Yang (Justin H. Min) malfunctions. He's not just some robotic butler; he's a culture technosapien meant to help Jake's adoptive daughter, Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja), learn about her Chinese heritage.

In one of the many conversations that animate "Columbus," a serenely intelligent first feature from the Korean American writer-director Kogonada, a part-time librarian named Casey (Haley Lu Richardson) and her co-worker Gabriel (Rory Culkin) discuss a tricky double standard. As Gabriel notes, someone who loves video games but finds books boring is criticized for having a short attention span, while someone with the opposite inclination is praised for having a long one. "It's not a matter of attention span, but of interest," he says. "Are we losing interest in things that matter?" Mercifully, he does not go on to extol the importance of gentle, gorgeously contemplative independent films like this one, though by that point "Columbus" has already made the case in much more delicate and persuasive terms.