I was trying to describe to a friend a new film called After Yang, which is currently in theaters and streaming on Showtime. I told her it’s a quiet, small-scale sci-fi film without action sequences or alien invasions. She said shrewdly, “Oh, you mean it’s contemplative sci-fi.”

Then she had some amusing and scornful things to say about the inevitably spare and ascetically beautiful production design of this new sci-fi strand made along Ex Machina lines. Sure enough, the characters in After Yang live and work amid distractingly luxe, sparse, clean-lined decor, featuring natural fabrics, earthenware dishes, huge windows overlooking exquisite green spaces, and mostly empty shelving units with a few simple but meaningful plants and pieces of pottery set out in rigorously symmetrical patterns.

Written and directed by South Korean filmmaker Kogonada, After Yang is contemplative sci-fi all right. It has the tone of a high-minded short story — probably because it’s based on one by Alexander Weinstein, an English professor who’s affiliated with the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, which turns out to be a real thing.