I undoubtedly put this movie on my list because of the sci-fi premise of a family coming to terms with the absence of a human-like robot helper they've come to love, but it reminded me about another recent watch, All of Us Strangers, whose writer/director had a supernatural premise but wasn't terribly interested in anything apart from how it affected the characters.

In the same way, when Yang (Justin Min) starts malfunctioning in a family dance competition in front of the TV, director Kogonada is more concerned with dad Jake (Colin Farrell), mother Kyra (Jodie Turner Smith) and daughter Mika (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) all coming to terms with it in their own way.

Even though the director creates an aesthetically beautiful future world on screen that makes narrative as well as artistic sense, he doesn't really care about the economics or blinking lights of broken-down robots.

Mika is crestfallen, considering the device her older brother, so Jake becomes determined to have it fixed, but Kyra thinks it might be an opportunity to teach the kid about grief gently, to not rely on technology so much and that it might be their chance/responsibility to step into the breach – albeit at the expense of their careers – and be for Mika what Yang was.

It's a worthy set-up for a family drama in a very well imagined, designed and shot world as Jake continues the adventure of trying to get Yang fixed – including a subplot of struggling with bureaucracy because they bought it from a reseller who no longer operates so the warranty is void, etc.

It dovetails into another subplot where he takes some CPU or chip from Yang to a researcher who realises pivotal experiences are stored in the robot, something the manufacturer has long denied exists. As Jake accesses and watches recordings from those memories, it raises the spectre that Yang's programming and observation of human life might have even made him sentient, questioning his own existence, death, love, etc.

That's particularly the case when a young blonde woman keeps showing up in videos of Yang's memories, so Jake becoming determined to find out who she was. The answer is both very prosaic – alluding to the notion that Yang was never more than a commodity to be bought and sold – and very soulful, revealing a past relationship with the woman.

Unfortunately, it proceeds to disappear up its own narrative arse when it branches out even further into the story about Yang and the blonde woman that I won't reveal here, but which muddied the waters as the story drew to a close and mostly lost me.

But the world depicted looks beautiful and the cast and script are all a pleasure to watch. I'm also consistently surprised and delighted both by and for Colin Farrell, who blazed into Hollywood on the back of a bad boy, big swinging dick image but has crafted a much more soulful career since.