Jin (John Cho) returns to Columbus, Indiana, to wait out his estranged father's hospitalization, a duty he resents more than he admits.
He meets Casey (Haley Lu Richardson), a young architecture obsessive who has stalled her own life to care for her mother, played by Michelle Forbes. Their conversations, held mostly outdoors and mostly in transit, circle a shared problem: how much of your life you owe to people who need you, and what it costs to keep deferring your own. Kogonada, working from his own script, sets a deliberately quiet pace, trusting two strangers talking near buildings to carry the whole film.
Kogonada spent years as an anonymous video essayist, dissecting the visual grammar of directors like Yasujiro Ozu, Alfred Hitchcock and Wes Anderson for outlets including Sight & Sound, while working on an unfinished dissertation on Ozu. Columbus was his first feature, made after that long formal apprenticeship rather than through film school or a shorts career. He and cinematographer Elisha Christian chose to shoot entirely on location in Columbus, Indiana, a small city with an unlikely concentration of modernist buildings by architects such as Eero Saarinen and I.M. Pei, treating the structures less as scenery than as characters.
It's an assured, hypnotically paced debut, and Richardson's performance is the film's clearest achievement, locating urgency inside restraint. Kogonada repeatedly frames Jin and Casey as small, balanced figures inside the modernist buildings' own symmetries, so the architecture's rigor becomes a visual argument about the order the characters are struggling to impose on their lives, holding still long after a more conventional drama would have cut away.
Columbus is an independent Sundance title from 2017 rather than a new release, so it moves between platforms more often than a current blockbuster. Check its listing on PLOT for the film's current streaming or rental availability before planning a watch tonight.
