This first report on Love me comes from our team following its premieres at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. We’ll update this piece when there’s more information about the film’s release.
Logline
On a post-apocalyptic Earth, two trolling AIs – an internet-enabled robot buoy and an orbiting satellite (played by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, respectively) – forge a tentative emotional bond and begin emulating their long-gone creators.
Longer line
The directorial debut of Sam and Andy Zuchero is a charming oddity: a quasi-love story between artificial intelligences who have to reinvent love from scratch, based on the strikingly useless images of it left behind by their creators. Partly told with robot models, partly with animated avatars in a shared virtual space, and partly in live action, it is a visually and narratively inventive story packed with symbolism that touches on science fiction’s most common question: “What does it mean to be human?” ? ”
But that symbolism isn’t overbearing, and the film could just as easily be understood as a tragicomic satire about social media and how poorly it reflects how people actually live. As the two AIs try to understand what they both want and how that relates to their relationship, they take cues from YouTube, and one lifestyle blogger in particular (also played by Stewart), with complicated results. Like so much of the film, the satirical aspects are funny, but they lead to some pretty dark, sad places.
What is Love Me trying to do?
Pixar fans will definitely be reminded of this WALL-E in the early series of Love me, as the battered, rusty Earth AI and its sleek, shiny counterpart in space connect for the first time and try to figure each other out despite their conflicting programming. The cute robot model of the buoy, in which the film floats in the water on Earth, has a distinctly WALL-E-esque desolation: the movement and iridescence of her single central ‘eye’ clearly convey hope, longing, frustration and shame as she looks up into the sky to her distant counterpart and they send messages back and forth. For a 90 minute film Love me feels surprisingly relaxed – especially early on, as the two characters begin to establish their own identities and sense each other within the various virtual spaces they create to communicate.
Then, as the buoy tries to force the two of them into a routine lifted from her favorite YouTube influencer video, everything gets more complicated. The Zucheros’ script is surprisingly cruel and one-sided in the second and third acts, with the female-coded buoy proving needy, controlling, blinkered and vulnerable, compared to the more even-tempered and emotionally mature satellite. The choice to saddle these two robots with gender in the first place feels strange and not entirely necessary. The choice to then lock them into stereotypical roles of ‘women are emotional and complicated, men are rational and simple’ is even more questionable.
But there really doesn’t seem to be any intention to reinforce gender bias or belittle Stewart’s character. Love me seems to be trying to tell a story about emotional growth, independence, and the positives and negatives of feeling trapped in a relationship with someone else. Those intentions grow vaguer as the story progresses from the very simple opening and quiet, hilarious second act to an ambitious, manic finale that feels strangely like an echo of Darren Aronofsky’s Mother!complete with changing nightmare images and a traveling camera that chases the characters through an unpredictable environment.
Does Love Me live up to its premise?
Love me‘s mocking of the artificiality of influencer lifestyle blogging feels quite dated – this is exactly the sort of thing Black mirror has been doing this for ten years, and it isn’t any fresher here. And the ultimate message pretty much boils down to “Be yourself,” which feels like a fairly generic conclusion for such an enjoyably strange, specific film.
That said, it’s still an impressive debut. The visual approach is smart and immersive, as the two AIs move their interactions into a virtual space, and that space continues to evolve as they do. Frequent returns to their real bodies, each undergoing their own metamorphoses as millennia pass, pointedly remind the audience that their world – and by proxy their entire relationship – is an artificial construct that only exists because they agree on it. It’s a powerful metaphor for the way that every relationship is a matter of collusion and cooperation, a kind of shared reality that can easily fall apart if both participants don’t look at it the same way.
And Stewart and Yeun put a real soulfulness and complexity into their characters, which is key to the entire story. Stewart’s character could easily be coded as shrill and obnoxious, but Stewart gives her a pathos born of clumsy desire, and it’s more relatable than a woman playing a droid analyzing the salinity in a CG body entitled has to be that.
The quote that says it all
“I’m…lifeform!” When the buoy first comes back online, she has very little sense of language or self. But when she makes contact with the satellite and discovers that it is only programmed to communicate with life forms – which she, as a robot, technically is not – she searches for a solution that will get his attention and focus. She figures out how to form a sentence, and in the same breath, how to lie to the only other intelligent being in her world. It’s a breakthrough moment for her that also painfully foreshadows many of their future interactions.
Most memorable moment
In a moment of existential despair, the buoy falls on his back and slowly sinks itself into the water, like Homer Simpson walking backwards into the hedge. It’s a simultaneously tragic and hilariously melodramatic moment, made for gifs and “hard same, my boo buddy, hard same” memes.
Is Love Me good?
Love me it feels like it could have used a few more drafts of the script, to more carefully balance the characters and story and make the themes a little richer. But it’s a daringly weird debut, executed with real style and vision. It’s an oddity that’s sure to appeal to fans of similarly strange, high-concept love stories like Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.
When can we see it?
Love me is currently looking for a distributor. Polygon will update this coverage when a platform and release date are determined.