Zi: Kogonada returns to indie filmmaking with a dreamy, directionless Hong Kong mystery

• Reviewed from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival

Kogonada’s zi is light on its feet and unbound by narrative convention, a film that feels like a direct reaction to the director’s most recent film, the earnest, studio-funded A Big Bold Beautiful Journey (2025), which was widely panned by critics upon release last year. The former video essayist filmmaker renders Hong Kong as a site of almost sublime anonymity, where a young violinist Zi (Michelle Mao) is plagued by visions of her future self. Her loneliness is interrupted by two strangers, the quirky American Elle (Haley Lu Richardson) and her researcher ex-boyfriend Min (Jin Ha), and across one intimate, spectral night, the three of them confess and confront painful truths.

As an exercise in lush, subdued atmosphere and ephemeral intimacy, zi succeeds, but despite the film’s sharp sense of alienation – aided by symmetrical shots of empty alleys and compositions by the late Ryuichi Sakamoto – the free-flowing zi features little drama or insight worthy of its stunning sensory merits.

Zi isn’t just destabilised by seeing her future self roaming the same streets she walks, but also by a death in the family and grave-sounding hospital tests. After visiting one of the city’s hillside cemeteries, an overwhelmed Zi is approached by the kindly Elle, whose cheap and hideous bright yellow wig denotes an acceptance of being an outsider in the city.

zi’s focus on unlikely connections and aberrations in memory echoes films like Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) and Lou Ye’s Suzhou River (2000) – two international disciples of Vertigo (1958). One way Marker and Ye conjured a sense of melancholy and mystery was through distanced, even-toned storytelling; by contrast, the awkward, stilted rhythms of zi’s improvisational dialogue does not sell the same effect. But there is something thoughtfully cinematic in the story’s central half-mystery: the explanation of Zi’s memories has a striking, melancholic parallel with the way cinema captures and relives the past by forever isolating it from the present moment.

Kogonada and his regular cinematographer Benjamin Loeb shot guerilla-style in Hong Kong’s streets, markets, and walkways, intercut with claustrophobic angles of actors who often animate their thinly-conceived characters into people who feel truly alive. Kogonada’s first feature films, Columbus (2017) and After Yang (2021), had a specificity and intention to their stories about how people become deeply attached to their singular, modern environments. 

If zi is indeed Kogonada’s response to his unfulfilled ambitions with a studio project, then he has mistaken spontaneity and impulse for rich, affecting drama; zi is too untethered and directionless to observe anything novel about being lost in the modern world. At several points, zi cuts through its meandering haze with something fragile and graspably human – attempted kisses and goodbye songs – but like the protagonists’ visions, they are brief glimpses into something more mysterious and poignant.