Entertainment
Kogonada Tries an Experimental Movie After His Big Margot Robbie and Colin Farrell Flop
With his first two films, Kogonada created a style for himself that felt just right, telling stories that managed to be light, yet powerful. 2017’s Columbus and 2021’s After Yang were soulful and simple, but exquisitely crafted and emotionally wrecking. Even his video essays on different filmmakers like Wes Anderson, Richard Linklater, Stanley Kubrick, and many other filmmakers with distinct styles still managed to capture his own flourishes and talents.
But last year, Kogonada took a shot at something more mainstream with A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, starring Colin Farrell and Margot Robbie. This romantic fantasy, which wasn’t written by him, felt like Kogonada trying to bring his specific style into a narrative that didn’t quite match his tone. The movie was a curious failure, and a film that felt like Kogonada trying to stretch himself and losing a bit of himself in the process.
Finding himself exhausted by the logistics of making a bigger film, Kogonada went to Hong Kong with a few friends after the opening of A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, and in just three weeks, they made the film zi. Almost as though Kogonada was actively attempting to fight back against the last film he made, zi was made with an incredibly small team, shot spontaneously, and trying to build the story as they went along. The result is a film that feels like Kogonada attempting to get back to where he once was before A Big Bold Beautiful Journey, but with a movie that feels more like an experiment than anything else.
Kogonada’s Latest Is More Ephemeral Than Most of His Movies
Set in Hong Kong, we meet Zi (Michelle Mao), a woman who keeps having visions of her future self that she can’t escape. Zi is waiting for the result of a scan, and is struggling with the uncertainty of what’s going on when she meets L (played by Kogonada favorite, Haley Lu Richardson), who offers to help her. We also find that these two are being followed by Min (Jin Ha), who we discover had a decade-long relationship with L, and since he works at the neurology center Zi was observed at, it seems he knows more than he lets on about what’s going on in Zi’s head.
Kogonada’s films usually take their time, quiet pieces that feel impeccably structured and regimented, yet zi is decidedly bucking that trend. There’s an intentionally ephemeral quality to the story, as though all of this could be a dream, or it could all be a hazy reality. Because of that, it certainly owes plenty to Wong Kar-wai, who also frequently films without a clear idea of where the story is going. Unfortunately, that doesn’t entirely work as well here as it does with Wong Kar-wai, with a story that slides through your fingers just when it seems like you’ve found something to grasp onto.
Because of that, zi isn’t what you’d call a return to form for Kogonada, but rather, somewhat of a reset artistically for the writer-director-editor. Zi is a character presented as lost, confused in her life, and especially unsure about what she keeps seeing as her future self that keeps coming into her field of view. It’s hard not to see this as symbolic of what Kogonada must be feeling now as a filmmaker, uncertain of his future, unsure of where to go, but desperately searching for answers. It’s also a film that’s likely more intriguing for its meta-narrative than for the story that was obviously being made up on the spot as Kogonada’s team went.
‘zi’ Feels Like Kogonada Is Trying To Find His Love for Filmmaking Again
In a way, zi does feel like Kogonada falling in love with filmmaking again through this experimental process, and in doing so, he’s sticking with a small team of people he obviously trusts. His cast and crew are all producers on this project, and it does feel like an effort of love. Richardson is never better than when she’s in Kogonada’s camera, and she’s a burst of life in this story. Mao is decent as a character we can’t quite pin down and of which we don’t get many solid answers about, while Jin Ha as Min is best when he’s put alongside Richardson and reckoning with their recent relationship that fell apart — yet frustrating as a character who has answers that he refuses to share about what’s going on.
Kogonada also brought along his After Yang and A Big Bold Beautiful Journey cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, who makes Zi’s foggy world come to life in beautiful, confusing ways, while the soundtrack mostly relies on the music of Ryuichi Sakamoto, who the film is dedicated to. As an aesthetic piece, zi is undoubtedly successful, and even when the story is hard to parse, it’s hard to not get wrapped up in the pleasing sights and sounds of what Kogonada is going for.
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But again, zi is a film that is more of an experiment than a movie, and that’s what ultimately hurts it. We can feel the run-and-gun nature of this story in every scene, the unclear direction that’s obviously being made up on the spot, and the performances that don’t quite know what to play because they don’t know enough about their characters. zi almost comes off like a mood board for a potential Kogonada film more than a concrete Kogonada film. Every once in a while, zi seems like it’s moving forward to finding the structure it so desperately needs, close to latching onto some semblance of narrative that we can fully connect with, but it soon fades away like a passing vision. Like Zi, we watch the film searching for answers and clarity that never come.
Even though zi isn’t quite the powerhouse of independent cinema that films like Columbus and After Yang were, it does feel like the work that Kogonada needed to do in order to right his sails and figure out where to go next. zi is essentially a cinematic palette cleanser for the filmmaker, and while it’s interesting to watch him work through his issues after the failure of his last film, and hopefully, fall back in love with film, it’s just not entirely there. At the beginning of zi, the title character asks if she’ll be lost forever. With zi, Kogonada proves that he’s no longer lost, but he’s at least on the right track to finding where he needs to be.
zi premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival.
- Release Date
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January 24, 2026
- Runtime
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99 Minutes
- Director
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Kogonada
- Writers
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Kogonada
- Producers
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Kogonada, Michelle Mao, Jin Ha, Haley Lu Richardson, Christopher Radcliff, Benjamin Loeb
Cast
- Kogonada’s latest is an aesthetically pleasing experiment.
- The three main characters are intriguing, if a bit underwritten.
- This is also more experiment than movie.
- You can tell this story was made on the fly, rather than working with an actual script.