“There is no something without nothing.”

At this point I have a Pavlovian response to the A24 logo at the beginning of a film—even if the premise intrigues, the gut-level revulsion reassures me that it will dawdle around in the shallow end of two or three of the most obvious thematic options and present itself as a life-changing experience. There are exceptions to the rule, of course, but After Yang joins a long list of critically acclaimed films that are basically feature length equivocations on a single basic theme.

In this one, a family’s big brother robot (Justin H. Min), purchased to help their adopted daughter (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) learn about her cultural heritage, malfunctions and is taken to a black market repairman (Ritchie Coster) to be serviced, only for the owners/parents (Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith) to discover that, against the manufacturer’s stated policy, he has a memory bank that records and logs key experiences, the bulk of which suggest the most important thing in the bot’s life is not his family but his secret romantic partner (Haley Lu Richardson). That she happens to be a clone has no impact on the story other than to aid in presenting a connection between individuals from separate marginalized groups.

Most of the rest of the film is like that, too, with the nefarious corporate privacy invasion angle petering out quietly, most of the characters having completely neutral personalities, and myriad other trivial dead-ends. It’s only invigorating aspect is the way Kogonda presents variations on the memories as they’re replayed, sometimes showing them from multiple angles, other times repeating the same angle multiple times. While stylistic and narrative restraint can be effective, muting every chord makes for a fairly uninteresting song and the fey, glacial, hermetic presentation of After Yang is, in fact, an identifiable aesthetic, frequently tweaked but easily discernible as its pasted onto each new self-satisfied, single-idea film, almost always giving an air of sophistication and gravity to a high-concept screenplay that the filmmaker thinks is the most transformative piece of art since sliced bread.

One of the exceptions to A24’s formula, Ex Machina (2015), already delivered a thrilling artificial intelligence storyline, unfolding in a lab setting where a humanoid bot overwhelms a flesh-and-blood subject with its façade of humanity. After Yang goes one step further, positing not only a believable human presentation but the existence of an android soul (which is silly because he’s clearly programmed for his role and thus never seems human at all). It’s not quite as blithely offensive as Disney’s Soul (2020), because we’re not yet living in the midst of humanoid robot companions but also—because it apparently needs saying—we don’t need to imagine a scenario in which black people have souls. Anyway, aside from the multiracial family, with which it does nothing other than present it as a merit unto itself, the “technosapien” soul is the film’s solitary idea, and it languidly circles it until it tuckers itself out and rolls over for a belly rub.

Digging itself even further into the hole, it holds out as a tender, profound moment the bot’s suggestion that annihilation is fine by him. A quiet acceptance and tacit promotion of post-religious sentiment. This, after filching a metaphor from the mouth of Christ himself, the conqueror of death and redeemer of mankind—and without much conviction, simply because it’s the eschatology du jour.

I wasn’t really expecting to get so worked up about an overblown piece of artless bloviation, but I’ll lay a few cards on the table: if, against every evidence and intuition and visible indication and personal assurance, Christ turns out to be false, it will still be true that a lifelong process of sanctification—increasingly conformed to the image of Christ, dying to sin and living unto righteousness—is inherently worth committing to. The practice of faith, discipline, charity, and hope remains the superior way of life; more coherent, luminous, and dignified than the beige gospel of therapeutic detachment.