{"id":429353,"date":"2026-01-25T17:33:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-25T17:33:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/429353\/"},"modified":"2026-01-25T17:33:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-25T17:33:08","slug":"kogonadas-small-slight-beautiful-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/429353\/","title":{"rendered":"Kogonada’s Small, Slight, Beautiful Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tLight and shimmery and intricately formed as a dandelion clock, Kogonada<\/a>\u2018s 2017 debut \u201cColumbus\u201d walked a fine tonal line between poetic and prosaic, intellect and feeling, all without slipping into preciousness. That balance can be hard to maintain when budgets get bigger and concepts higher: The director\u2019s sci-fi follow-up \u201cAfter Yang\u201d was handsome, ambitious and a bit fey, but still preferable to the gloopy tweeness of last year\u2019s Margot Robbie-Colin Farrell dud \u201cA Big Bold Beautiful Journey.\u201d Coming swiftly on that film\u2019s heels, Kogonoda\u2019s fourth feature \u201cZi<\/a>\u201d feels a clear attempt at course-correction: a jagged, mood-driven miniature, sharing his debut\u2019s fascination with urban geography and loudly ambient silence, and reuniting him with \u201cColumbus\u201d star Haley Lu Richardson<\/a> to boot. <\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cZi,\u201d too, is not the film that \u201cColumbus\u201d is, but it represents a more fruitful creative direction for its helmer \u2014 whose odd, ruminative worldview appears to be better served by free-range independent production than high-gloss studio cinema. Shot in just three weeks in Hong Kong, taking an off-the-cuff approach in line with the unmoored wanderings of its characters, this translucent study of a mentally addled young woman finding an unlikely ally in an American outsider begins promisingly, mixing everyday city portraiture with glitchy flashes of uncanny psychodrama. <\/p>\n

\n\tYet the many small, darting ideas in Kogonoda\u2019s script never quite add up to a big one. \u201cZi\u2019s\u201d chief pleasures are ambient, whether capturing the fluorescent glare and sonic bustle of a night market, or the hard, still sweep of an empty concrete walkway. Premiering in Sundance\u2019s more experimentally-oriented Next section, the film is too wispy to be more than a fringe arthouse prospect, though its rich visual and sonic textures will be best served by theatrical showings.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs the film introduces young concert violinist Zi (Michelle Mao) in a state of disarray, pacing the sidewalks and cemeteries and back alleys of Hong Kong, it takes some time for her fragments of anguish to coalesce into something resembling a narrative. We learn that her parents have passed away, though it\u2019s not clear how recently. At their graveside, she frets aloud that their faces might slip her faltering memory, and she won\u2019t recognize them in the afterlife. Such mortal concerns aren\u2019t just in her head, or rather, they\u2019re very literally in her head: She\u2019s recently been diagnosed with a potential brain tumor, while her neurological ailments may account for the unnerving out-of-body visions she keeps having of her future self.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen she\u2019s approached in the street by kindly, concerned American stranger Elle (Richardson), Zi is convinced they\u2019ve already met, at least in her time-scrambled consciousness. Kogonada\u2019s slender script, too, implies something cosmically fated about this apparent chance encounter, a not-quite-coincidence also tangled up in Elle\u2019s relationship with her estranged fianc\u00e9 Min (Jin Ha) \u2014 who\u2019s stalking both women unbeknownst to them, and also works at the neurological clinic that Zi is scheduled to visit the next day. There\u2019s some initial intrigue in these cryptic, temporally out-of-sync connections, teasing a lo-fi supernatural shift that never takes flight, before Kogonada moves onto his next airily philosophical tangent.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cZi\u201d is most rewarding, however, at its least complicated, as it tracks a fast-building kinship between two young women feeling alone and unsettled in a city that buzzes unfeelingly around them. Elle, clearly carrying her own damage beneath a crinkly smile and a yellow dime-store wig, insists on spending the day with the agitated Zi, cuing a directionless walking tour of bustling city-centre hotspots and abandoned passageways, al fresco noodle shops and shabby karaoke bars. All are shot with unprettified but tactile warmth and, later, a muted nighttime glow by cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, picking out small pools of color (Zi\u2019s cherry-red shoulder bag, intrusions of verdant foliage) in the urban grayscale.<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch of the bonding here is tacit, which is for the best when Kogonada\u2019s dialogue can veer into banal overstatement. \u201cI\u2019ve always felt untethered, detached, floating in this world,\u201d Zi says somewhat unnecessarily, given how the filmmaking language has already established that sense of anxious drift. Mao is sympathetic in a largely reactive role, conveying interior crisis through brittle body language and a deep, distracted gaze. While the reliably charismatic Richardson is a welcome animating force, the character of Elle is even more sketchily conceived, down to a hobby \u2014 the recording and collection of city sounds \u2014 that feels more an extension of the director\u2019s interests than anything else.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn the plus side, those sounds are most vibrantly collected. \u201cZi\u201d thrums with with the oceanic rush of traffic, the patter and chatter of pedestrians, the delicate assertions of nature and weather against a wall of man-made noise \u2014 all jostling for our ears\u2019 attention with Kogonoda\u2019s typically elegant musical selections, which run the gamut from liquid piano pieces by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto (to whom the film is dedicated) to bristling electronica to Richardson\u2019s tipsy, spirited wailing of Alanis Morissette\u2019s \u201cOne Hand in My Pocket.\u201d If the film weren\u2019t so arresting to look at, it could often be absorbed with eyes closed: If its larger message is elusive, \u201cZi\u201d advocates for taking the world in at your own sensory pace. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Light and shimmery and intricately formed as a dandelion clock, Kogonada\u2018s 2017 debut \u201cColumbus\u201d walked a fine tonal…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":429354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,196049,98239,206,98265,203912],"class_list":["post-429353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-haley-lu-richardson","tag-kogonada","tag-movies","tag-sundance-film-festival","tag-zi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=429353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/429353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/429354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=429353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=429353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=429353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}