Columbus (2017)

Columbus is a film about the healing power of paying attention. Set in Columbus, Indiana — a small Midwestern city that happens to contain one of the most remarkable concentrations of modernist architecture in the world — it follows two people who are stuck. Casey, played by Haley Lu Richardson, is a young woman who has deferred college to care for her mother and channels her intelligence into an encyclopedic knowledge of the town's buildings. Jin, played by John Cho, is a Korean-born man who has returned reluctantly to attend to his father, a renowned architecture scholar who has collapsed while visiting the city. They meet, they walk, they talk about buildings, and in doing so they begin to heal.

What makes Columbus so remarkable as contemplative cinema is how Kogonada uses architectural composition as an emotional register. When Casey stands before the Irwin Union Bank, the building's glass walls and clean geometry reflect her desire for clarity and order in a chaotic home life. When Jin smokes alone outside a Saarinen chapel at night, the building's solitary glow mirrors his isolation. These are not heavy-handed metaphors but delicate visual rhymes that accumulate into something deeply moving. The camera often holds on buildings for long seconds after the characters have left the frame, asking us to see what they see — to practice the kind of sustained attention that the film argues is itself a form of care.

For the anxious or overwhelmed viewer, Columbus offers a particular kind of comfort. Its symmetrical compositions and clean lines speak directly to the part of the brain that craves order. The conversations between Casey and Jin are warm, intelligent, and free of melodrama. There is no villain, no crisis, no raised voice. The film's central argument — that beauty can heal, that buildings can move us to tears, that attention is a form of love — feels not like a thesis but like a lived truth. It is the rare quiet film that will leave you wanting to look more closely at the world outside your window, and that impulse alone makes it essential viewing.