5 stars

This film by the Korean-American video essayist and filmmaker Kogonada is so deliberately slow and meditative in its pacing, enriching in its colour palette and nourishing in its narrative intent that I came out of it with my skin tingling, like emerging from a day spa after a treatment of jasmine tea, hot rock therapy and light massage.

Working in his native Irish accent, Colin Farrell plays Jake, husband to Kyra (Jodie Turner-Smith) and father to Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja).

It is some time in the future and this once-childless couple have enlisted help in bringing up their adopted daughter Mika with the android Yang (Justin H. Min).

As their daughter is Chinese, the couple invested in a robot from the multinational company Brother and Sister that produce culture service androids. Yang is both nanny and friend to the growing Mika, but his job is also to be a connection to her culture, teaching her Mandarin and Chinese philosophy.

As a busy couple, they are both struggling with bringing income into the home, to the point where Yang has a far more meaningful connection to their daughter than they do.

They have become estranged from each other.

Jake has a teashop which takes him away from the family home. Kyra's work also takes her into the city with pressing overnight deadlines, leaving Yang to do much of the parenting.

When Yang starts to get sick, losing functionality until he is just a lifeless doll, Mika is beside herself and Jake has to find a solution.

As the androids are built to sustainably decompose when they reach end-of-life, he has a very short window to do so.

Taking Yang to a commercial android repair centre, he discovers the unit is unreplaceable and his only option is to send him back for recycling, but the family have formed an emotional connection with Yang.

A neighbour recommends a backdoor engineer who busts into Yang's operational core where Jake discovers a repository of memory recordings, and Jake and Krya make a connection with this android and the rich inner life he had built without their realising.

Jake and Kyra, meanwhile, have some reprioritising to do to return to the role of parenting their child.

Gosh this was a lovely film.

Kogonada is a deep thinker when it comes to film, writing for publications like Sight and Sound and producing documentary-like video essays that interrogate the aesthetics of pop culture.

His aesthetics on this film are impeccable. I promise you'd be Pinteresting the house After Yang is set in for your eventual and certain Powerball win. Its warm blues and greens and glass shelves look out on to pine forests. As shot by cinematographer Benjamin Loeb, every scene gives the brain another incremental bump of serotonin.

Having Farrell's character run a tea shop and be a professional tea maker creates eddies of calming contemplative moments in the film, but also gives Yang's character some considered dialogue.

Is Yang aware that his core is malfunctioning as he reflects that he wished he was programmed to understand tea's taste and therefore its emotional appeal?

Ryuichi Sakamoto of Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence fame provides a musical piece for the film and gives that name-recognition draw card, but throughout the film the score from Aska Matsumiya adds a contemplative tone.

A big movie star like Farrell catches the eye and so it takes a minute to remind yourself to observe the other performers at work, but the performances are uniformly strong.

The young Tjandrawidjada sings her android best friend's favourite melody throughout the film, and her voice is startling.

Based on the children's book Saying Goodbye to Yang, this film is about the connections of family far more than it is about robots and technology.