I Was a Simple Man

A stirring, melancholic portrait of an ailing, elderly patriarch grappling with his encroaching mortality.

A 100-minute spell of beauty and melancholy, intimate and grand in equal measure.

The film's quietly uncanny narrative wondrously depicts not only a dying man's reflection on his life, but also the very nature of Hawaii itself.

Yogi creates a cinema that is simultaneously meticulously physical and wildly metaphysical, offering passionate dramatic correlates and symbols for the unrepresentable-for the subjective experience of death.

The film is defined by its discipline and a style that might be called lushly austere. This is refined, specialist cinema that will be warmly embraced by aesthetes.

There's poetry here, but there are also long sections that feel hollow.

I Was A Simple Man is layered and reveals a lot more as the movie progresses, and there is so much to unpack.

Two features in, Yogi’s still expanding his emotional and stylistic range for something that’s more often hypnotic than clumsy.

Yogi turns something personal into a uniquely ethereal look at mortality, repression, and reckoning with the sins of your past. But it’s the perspective that’s distinct. Yogi tells the bulk of his story through the mind of a dying man.

Yogi, with his second film, prefers poetic monologues, but strikes a balance between mood piece and character study.