Columbus is a precious kind of contradiction: both an unabashed mystery and a work completely expected of its author. If you want to understand the film, you’d best get acquainted with the filmmaker, Kogonada, frequently self-styled as “:: kogonada,” a short film director with a portfolio of visual essays found within the annals of the Criterion Collection. He’s a man born to pore over the filmographies of the masters—Godard, Ozu, Bresson—and boil their pictures down to their essences. You figure it takes time and effort to reach the conclusions Kogonada does, but his process reads as effortless, and his insights obvious. (In the interest of clarity: His criticism is a mirror through which other critics understand that they are clowns.)
So of course Kogonada has made his feature debut with an emphasis on method and a sharp eye for theme. Columbus, appropriately enough, is an impeccably constructed movie about architecture, and this feels something like a calculated risk: Settling his film on a foundation of cool, minimalist craftsmanship, with a through line of building design, sounds way too on the nose for its own good—too coy, too affected. But Kogonada’s interest in architecture equals the interest his characters have in architecture, which is low to the point of being tangential to the rest of the film. Columbus is a loving tone poem dedicated to its namesake locale, a modestly sized burg in Indiana where apparently everyone knows a thing or three about what goes into building buildings, but the buildings are window dressing, backdrops to poetic melancholy.
The precipitating event of Columbus’s plot occurs in the margins, half on screen and half off, when an architect visiting the town suddenly collapses and sinks into a coma. His condition is such that his estranged son, Jin (John Cho), immediately leaves his home and his job in Seoul, as one would expect family to do—though Jin doesn’t feel particularly warm and fuzzy about his dad. His presence in Indiana is justified as a response to obligation’s call. He’s there because he has to be. We can almost see his misery choking the air around him.
Kogonada introduces us to Jin only after introducing us to young Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a Columbus resident who, like Jin, cites duty to family as her reason for living there. Her mother (Michelle Forbes) is an addict in recovery, and Casey can’t abide the idea of abandoning her to pursue loftier dreams, if not out of love for Mom than out of fear of a relapse, or worse. Jin and Casey are strangers in a land that doesn’t exactly qualify as strange, but doesn’t exactly qualify as routine, smalltown America, either, and as strangers in a land that is neither strange nor routine they inevitably meet, bond and work out their various parental issues and future anxieties with one another. Theirs is a platonic love rather than romantic, and if for no other reason than that, Columbus feels like an achievement: It sets up the well-trod, icky manic pixie dream girl trope only to bypass it entirely.
For Jin and Casey, all is uncertain. For everyone else, certainty lies in what they believe Jin and Casey need out of life. No spoilers, by the way. Columbus is the kind of movie that can’t readily be spoiled, or given away, or otherwise ruined by advanced discussion. It’s a movie of quiet, enigmatic grace, a totally relatable story of people stranded by responsibilities both self-imposed and imposed on them by others. “You don’t want to be a librarian,” Casey’s friend Gabriel (Rory Culkin) tells her toward the start of the film, the first of many assertions and declarations made by her peers regarding her prospects for attaining success and happiness. He’s ignorant, of course, to the reality of Casey, which is that she probably would be happy being a librarian in her hometown, with her mother, but that she’d probably also be happy doing other things, too. She’s just unsure what those other things might be, at least at first.