James Y. Lee
Whither Kogonada, video-essayist extraordinaire turned contemplative cinematic observer? The Korean-American filmmaker has long since developed a very specific kind of cult following for himself following the 2017 premiere of Columbus, an architectural near-masterwork that demonstrated Kogonada’s eye for formal construction in a story about two wayward souls struggling with the failures of their parents, the human capacity to build, and peaceful ways towards healing. His 2021 follow-up, After Yang, brought him into a much more speculative but no less introspective mode of storytelling, bringing him into the realm of android-based science fiction to ruminate about the means through which we form our identities as human beings.
But something has clearly changed within the span of the last two years. Kogonada’s first venture into studio-level filmmaking, the substantially panned A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), seems to have jarred him awake to the incompatibility of his newfound position in cinema, enough for him to want some kind of meaningful reinvigoration afterwards. That film was not something that he had either written or edited, a major departure from the control he demonstrated in Columbus and After Yang, telegraphed to an extent where you can clear identify the degree to which he had a hand over the tone and stories he wanted to tell.
So upon hearing that his latest film, Zi, was making its premiere at Sundance—a majorly pared-down production with only three actors and an incredibly small crew situating themselves in Hong Kong—a clear degree of interest very quickly formed. Its production was nearly improvisational; no real shot list, no real script, filmed over the course of three weeks in a city that was chosen based on near-random merits. The end result is a film that seems to fall into the pitfalls of this non-deliberate mode of cinematic storytelling at first, with a very meandering sense of direction, and perhaps a little too much time spent on establishing a very specific tone. But Kogonada, being the formalist he is, creates a surprisingly coherent tale from these circumstances—a collision of three artists on the streets of Hong Kong, all of whom possess tenuous ties to the past, present and future. It’s a fascinating demonstration of talent, at once his most stylistically inaccessible film while also perhaps an omen of future changes of pace to come.
The titular character of Zi has a lot on her plate by the time Kogonada’s latest work begins. A working career violinist, Zi (Michelle Mao) reminisces about the day she began seeing premonitions of herself in the future, glimpsing what she’s about to do only moments before she’s about to do it. First, she sees herself wandering Hong Kong, taking a call from her musical colleague where she tells him that the impending results of a brain scan from the local neurology center, worried that she’s exhibiting the initial symptoms of a brain tumor, might keep her from attending a tour that her orchestra is set to take part in. Next, she sees herself at her parents’ graves, speaking to them about how worried she is that she’s going to lose her memory of their faces, apologizing repeatedly and profusely for something she feels she has no control over. And then, she fatefully encounters her future self walking right outside a restaurant, accompanied closely by a woman wearing an off-puttingly large blonde wig, who future-Zi seems to have been traveling with for quite some time.
When Zi finally breaks down later that day from the overwhelming stress at a large stairway, she winds up encountering the blonde-wigged woman in the present moment; the disenchanted former dancer Elle (Haley Lu Richardson). She’s Arizona-born, having tried to start a career in New York for a while, and whose eventual failure brought her to Hong Kong. Her wig, unnatural as it is, seems to be a bid to try and anonymize herself—and she “collects sounds” by simply recording noises that interest her in her day-to-day. She’s a character who, in the wrong hands, would have come off as an insufferable manic-pixie-type, overzealously in tune with artistic expression and untethered from realistic expectations about life. And yet, Richardson and Kogonada still manage to give her just enough depth in the moments to come, which clues us into how much she may be motivated by a very specific kind of aversion to where she currently is in her life.
Part of what she’s also avoiding is in the engagement she broke off with a man named Min, who still lives in the city as well. Wonderfully rendered by an earnestly vulnerable Jin Ha, Min is a man who Elle knows has a talent for singing—he also has an association with the neurology center, and has been trailing Zi (and eventually Elle) for some time, taking diligent notes on what he observes. That routine of his continues right up until Elle brings Zi to his place after months of not seeing him, believing he can help Zi with the visions she’s been plagued by. From that exact moment onwards, Zi‘s most pivotal emotional centerpiece really begins to pick up steam, as this particular triad of a singer, violinist, and dancer proceed to bounce off each other—as well as their relationships to longing, attraction, and time—in unexpectedly moving fashion.
That’s not to say that the road to getting there is all that smooth for Zi. Again, it becomes rather easy to discern the fact that this film was made without a normal script and via a relatively flexible, non-traditional means of production, especially early on when it’s just Zi and Elle roaming the streets. Certain narrative threads, emotional beats, and otherwise feel either too disjointed or overbearingly repetitive at points, which might either gesture to an ostensible need to excusably fill time, or an oversight in what the audience might already be able to deduce. For one, a major recurring motif is the vision of a red-scarfed Zi indiscernibly talking to an older woman who we can reasonably infer may be Elle’s older self. It’s a mysterious-enough sight on its own that the film unfortunately cuts back to with such little restraint and such incredible frequency, especially in the film’s first half, that by the time we finally understand what it’s there for, its impact is relatively dulled.
Zi is ultimately filled with enough detail about its characters that it doesn’t fully feel like an exercise in narratively minimalist “vibes-based” storytelling, represented in recent years by arthouse filmmakers the likes of Rhayne Vermette, or masters of the slow-cinema form like Tsai Ming-liang. Kogonada gives Elle the most rendered detail as a character, lending Richardson room to explore her quirks and the desperation to reconnect that lies beneath them, beyond the overbearingly earnest presentation that Zi’s encounters with Elle start from. When conjoined with Min’s incredible earnestness—as someone whose happiness to see Elle again seems complicated by his awareness of how she left him—the film shows us a stark portrait of just how hard it is to reignite and maintain love in the face of contradicting dreams. One scene in particular, where a misunderstanding emerges between Elle and Min about gift-giving intentions and romantic cues, leads to an especially heartbreaking turn that Richardson and Ha navigate brilliantly.
The potency and history of Min and Elle’s dynamic retroactively makes especially clear why the meandering of Zi‘s first half feels so drawn out; because Zi and Elle’s initial dynamic, before they cross paths with Min, is predicated on the fact that Zi herself doesn’t feel like an active player in her own life. In the end, it’s ultimately Mao who may have gotten the shortest end of the stick among this cast, as wonderfully as she winds up playing this character. Zi’s state of mind is much more nebulous than either Elle or Min, and the detachment from the world that she experiences as a result of her visions (are they a symptom of her ambiguous tumor, a symbol for her fixation on the past, or an indicator of oracle-like status?) leads to her being the most emotionally distant fixture in a film whose literal title derives itself from her name.
Ultimately, it’s quite a good thing that a film like Zi exists, on multiple levels. Frustrating as a few components of its improvised narrative structure might be, it winds up stumbling into emotional coherence in a way that feels like it only would have been possible with Kogonada in total control at the helm. Even if the details of these characters and the ways they interact each other may not be totally predetermined, Kogonada seems to have found a consistent handle on what he wants this story to be; an acknowledgement of how hard it is to remain in the present, what it means to give up on promises and dreams, and how we can still try and reconnect despite the hurdles placed in front of us. Post-Sundance, Zi is destined to enter the court of public opinion as a deeply divisive film, made for a very specific kind of cinematic tolerance, but for a cinematic voice as earnest as Kogonada’s, his sincerity allows the film to center itself around something that very well may be worth watching for some.
