‘Zi’ Review: Kogonada Rediscovers His Voice with a Micro-Budget Hong Kong Experiment Starring Michelle Mao and Haley Lu Richardson

A Hong Kong violinist who’s losing her grip on reality, young Zi (Michelle Mao) is haunted by visions of her future self. The doctors at the local neurology center suspect that she might be suffering from the early symptoms of a brain tumor, but Zi — a being of pure cinema, cobbled together from the half-formed memories of films like “La Jetée” and “Cléo from 5 to 7” — will have to wait a long and lonely 24 hours for the test results to come back. 

Well, maybe not so lonely. Crying on one of the innumerable concrete steps that climb Lantau Island, Zi is consoled by a sweet American expat with a strangely familiar face (and an aggressively unnatural blonde wig). Her name is L, she’s a disillusioned former dancer played by the luminous Haley Lu Richardson, and she can’t help but reciprocate the inexplicable closeness that Zi feels towards her. Over the course of a single night together, these two lost souls will help to relocate each other in time — to resynchronize with the world around them, reconnect with the infinite potential of the present, and return themselves to the creative purpose that once anchored them to it. 

Even if seen without a shred of context, it would be obvious to anyone that “Zi” was made by someone who is — or hopefully was — desperate to spark a realignment of his own. To steal himself away from regret and anxiety and tether his perspective back to the now. Shot without a script or a budget in the immediate aftermath of Kogonada’s ill-received “A Big Bold Beautiful Journey” (the “After Yang” auteur’s studio debut, by all indications a soul-crushing experience for an artist whose two previous features retained the delicate grace of the video essays that he used to make), this searching and unformed wisp of an experiment hardly represents the first time that an ascendent director has scaled down after a misstep, but “Zi” takes the notion of “one for me” to much greater and more galvanizing extremes than usual.

This isn’t just a filmmaker trying to get back on track, it’s a filmmaker desperately, nakedly searching for a way to fall back in love with filmmaking itself. A way to prove that it might still love him back. (Kogonada described the project to IndieWire as “A retreat, as well as a pursuit.”)

While the prospect of watching Kogonada do that will naturally be of greater interest to those who have watched him get to this point, this movie’s palpably improvised nature — its stolen shots and recursive shape lend the impression of someone trying to cut their ultra-evocative vacation footage into a coherent narrative — would force anyone to wonder about the meta-textual aspects of its creation. “You feel like your sole purpose in life is something, and it doesn’t choose you back,” L sputters out at one point. “What do you do with that? I had to get away from it all. That’s why I came here. Wandering.”

‘Zi’Benjamin Loeb

Since arriving in Hong Kong, she’s made a habit of collecting sounds in much the same way as Kogonada has come there on the hunt for images. They both find a dissonance around Victoria Harbor that reflects their internal feelings of otherness and self-alienation. It’s China, but not. It’s a single city, but one split across two main areas by a stretch of the sea that some people never cross. It’s among the world’s most densely populated metropolises, but the vertical terrain seems fundamentally inhospitable to human civilization, and nature continues to assert itself between every skyscraper, shopping mansion, and crack in the sidewalk. Zi is the only native character in the film, but the history and design of Hong Kong reflects her disassociation as well — like her, the former British colony’s experience of the present is delayed. 

That’s the closest thing to a diagnosis we get for what ails her, though it’s clear that Kogonada is leaning more towards soft science-fiction than the stuff of hard medicine. “Temoral relativism” is how L’s ex-fiancé Min (Jin Ha) describes it, though he’s slow to reveal how much he knows about Zi’s condition. Everything she perceives is already in the past. I suppose that’s true for all of us to some degree, if you factor in the nanoseconds that elapse between stimuli and our ability to perceive it, but the situation is more pronounced for Zi (who Mao plays with the effervescent helplessness of a paper airplane). Of course, that doesn’t explain why she believes she’s bearing witness to visions of her future self, but that confusion only exacerbates her feelings of distance from the present. 

Even in its more platonic dimensions, the threadbare story that gradually allows Zi to close that gap is awash with the romance of loss, reconciliation, and belonging. Kogonada is falling back in love with the movies right before our eyes, and yet,  in characteristic fashion, that process isn’t garish or forced. His is a vision that is revealed through careful subtraction — by clearing away all of the dust and smudges that came to obscure it.

While Kogonada indulges in a few legible winks to his cinematic forebears (the most obvious of those being a step-printed homage to Wong Kar Wai, and my most far-fetched being a disoriented nod to José Luis Guerín’s “In the City of Sylvia”), he and cinematographer Benjamin Loeb almost completely eschew the neon exoticism that foreigners tend to look for in Hong Kong, with the vast majority of the film being captured in unfussy handheld shots that accentuate its here-and-now anxiety and delegate the emotional heavy lifting to an impeccably curated soundtrack of Ryuichi Sakamoto remixes and originals. 

By the end, “Zi” engenders a certain emotional attachment toward and between its characters, all of it building to a gently unexpected gutpunch of a final minute. But even that last-minute reveal — not a plot twist so much as a sudden change in perspective — is rooted more in the movie’s form than its plot, as Kogonada’s characters remain largely symbolic of their function in the writer-director’s journey back to himself.

It’s a testament to Mao, Ha, and especially Richardson — who continues to be so good at grounding Kogonada’s most abstract ideas in a tender human place — that “Zi” retains even a soft dramatic pull as it searches for the present, though its recursive nature certainly wasn’t conceived with a casual audience in mind. If you’re hooked, which I wasn’t, or haunted by it, which I was, that will likely have less to do with an acute emotional connection to these characters than with the overflowing rewards of watching someone rediscover the sound of their own voice, and hear a way forward into the future in its echoes. 

Grade: B

“Zi” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. It is currently seeking U.S. distribution.

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