Neither Kogonada nor his characters can go home again in the aimless Zi

It’s this dedication to an ethereal aesthetic—the Academy-ratio frame squeezing the handheld camerawork, jittery cuts, and photo-processing effects into a boxy little arthouse View-Master—that reaffirms Kogonada’s preference for poetic unreality and undermines the grounded emotions he tries to tap in the same film. Those familiar with Kogonada’s previous work will find it striving to achieve Columbus‘ elegant highs, even casting Richardson as its chattiest character. Zi leaves a neurological clinic set onto a head-spinning Cléo From 5 To 7-like path, awaiting more (possibly dire) information about her condition. Her public weeping draws in Elle, a wig-wearing flirt whose penchant for recording sounds in her adopted home confirms her as a twee daydream—or just one fractured representative of her creator’s ennui—who in turn pulls in her brokenhearted ex, serendipitously a researcher at the same clinic.

Between Zi’s unmoored temporal confusion, Elle’s desire to flee her old life, and Min’s melancholy duties (not to mention his background as a Korean-born expat like Kogonada), it isn’t too hard to peel back this light narrative and find the personal demons underneath. What’s more difficult is finding substance in their evening-long conversations, sporadic and half-baked as they are. Elle’s driven by a desire to care for Zi; Min is drawn in by his old flame; Zi is looking for any port in this storm before her body betrays her. While the film breezily flits through the packed streets and stairways of Hong Kong, sometimes evoking Wong Kar-Wai’s choppy step printing and sometimes settling into Kogonada’s pleasantly strict architectural framings, its perpetual return to these sketched characters—stiffly performed, especially by Richardson—feels forced compared to the moments when it luxuriates in its dreamy urban atmosphere.

This late-night wandering, this last hurrah for a brain possibly on its last sensible synapses, navigating alleys and tunnels and karaoke joints and bazaars in search of something worth staying up for, is more about momentary resonance than any deeper connection. Perhaps that fits for the musical trio (alongside the violinist and dancer, Min reveals himself as a singer), more able to translate their emotions into expressions of sound and movement than words. It’s certainly the tack taken by the heavily deployed piano score, which, pretty as it is (it’s Ryuichi Sakamoto, after all), contains more emotion than the rest of Zi combined. 

Zi begins with the self-shattering experience of seeing your own body across the street, separating “you” from a version of you that you don’t recognize. This unsettling split, not reconciled but assuaged during the film’s disposable vignettes, would lead anyone to scramble for the tethers keeping them sane, and strapping their identity together. That may or may not have been the mindset of Kogonada after making the leap from indie to studio and back again—the feeling of seeing a possible future for yourself laid out in front of you, and not liking what you see—but his movie can’t commit to something so targeted and focused. Rather, it’s as aimless as its out-of-place trio, hoping that something to hold onto will rise up out of the night, out of the cityscape, to save it from its own uncertainty.

Director: Kogonada
Writer: Kogonada
Starring: Michelle Mao, Haley Lu Richardson, Jin Ha
Release Date: November 6, 2026