Kogonado's Brilliant "Columbus"

Haley Lu Richardson and John Cho in Columbus (Photo by Elisa Christian)

Richard Brody’s wonderful “Revisiting Columbus, A Thrilling Drama of Growing Up Modernist” (newyorker.com, June 20, 2026) inspired me to revisit it, too. I watched it last night. What a great movie! I first saw it in 2017, when it came out. I liked it then. I like it even more now. It’s a coming-of-age story set in Columbus, Ohio. Columbus is home to a remarkable collection of renowned works of modern architecture. (I didn’t know this until I saw this movie.) The protagonist, a recent high-school graduate named Casey, seems stuck in place. Instead of leaving for college, she’s living with her mother and working at the local library. It turns out she’s staying home to help her mother (Michelle Forbes), a recovering drug addict who works two jobs (at a factory and as an office cleaner) to keep afloat. 

But Casey is something of a closet prodigy – growing up in Columbus, she’s become a connoisseur of its architectural treasures. When Casey meets Jin (John Cho), the son of an elderly Korean architect, a friendship soon develops despite their difference in age and experience, and Casey, “finding an intellectual peer, unleashes her enthusiastic architectural insights, reveals her prodigious intellect, and reignites long-dormant ambitions” (from Brody’s earlier “Highlights from the 2017 Sundance Film Festival” (newyorker.com, January 25, 2017).  

What I love about this movie is the way it blends architecture with story. It’s almost as if the director, Kogonada, set out to make a documentary about Columbus’s architecture and decided to tell a story at the same time. Brody writes, “The locations aren’t just picturesque settings for action but part of the subject—as if the film were both a fictional drama and a documentary about the locale.” Yes, exactly. 

Better than any other film I can think of, Columbus captures what it means to respond to something aesthetically. Brody says, “From the movie’s engaging story to its very texture, Kogonada has crafted a singular and startlingly original cinematic vision.” I agree. I think Columbus is destined to become a classic.