Kogonada's 'Zi,' a Hong Kong Night of Fading Memory, Wins NYT Critic's Pick

The New York Times has named "Zi," Kogonada's 99-minute experimental feature, a Critic's Pick, praising it as a sensory work "suffused with the hazy melancholy of nostalgia." The film, not rated and playing in theaters, screens in English, Cantonese and Mandarin with subtitles.

The story takes place over a single night in Hong Kong. Zi, played by Michelle Mao, suffers from a potential brain tumor and its strange side effects. She wanders the city with two strangers: a lost dancer named Elle (Haley Lu Richardson) and Elle's ex-fiancé, Min (Jin Ha). Kogonada wrote and directed the film, which the Times classifies as science fiction.

About halfway through, the review's critic notes, the film clicks into place. Just as it begins slipping into an impressionistic maelstrom, Zi asks whether she is living in the present or the past. "For you, it's always the past," her friend explains.

The question concerns the mysterious ailment that gives Zi troubling visions of herself. But the Times reads it as the film's true subject: the sensation of a forever past, the feeling of an indelible night turning evanescent as it fades into memory.

What carries the film?

Not the plot, according to the review. The Times calls the semi-story loose and describes the film at times as "a wisp," one that practically disintegrates into montages of dusky corridors and slow-motion tears set to plaintive piano chords.

The critic hears clear influences. Kogonada is assembling "a somewhat heavy-handed combination," the review states, of Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy conceit and Wong Kar-wai's stylized romantic flourishes.

Yet the verdict stays positive. The film is "gorgeously photographed and meaningfully felt," the Times writes, and it functions as the filmmaker's experimental rebuttal to "A Big Bold Beautiful Journey," his 2025 misfire into big studio sentimentalism.

The review frames "Zi" not as a return to indie roots but as something more pointed: the purest distillation of Kogonada's consistent preoccupations. Those are connections between lost souls, an existentialism both mournful and precious, and seeing life as moments that continue to pass us by.

What does this change for Kogonada?

After the studio detour of 2025, the Critic's Pick marks a restored critical standing. It signals that the director's experimental register — the impressionistic mode of his earlier work, now distilled to its essence — still commands institutional endorsement. For audiences, it offers a current theatrical chance to see that mode at feature length, in three languages, in a tight hour and 39 minutes.