Her

Saw Her, the film about a man brave enough to love a cellphone. Jokes aside, it is a more tender and kindly film than I would have expected going in. Set in a future which is both near and twee, the film follows a recently broken up romantic of a man who writes love letters for other people as his day job. He is a tech trend chaser and therefore picks up the latest phone with an AI OS with the voice of Scarlett Johansson. The protagonist's bemusement at her personality moves swiftly to ... something more?

I expected to be sort of skeezed out by the main character. The film does a lot of work humanizing him and making him seem withdrawn, yes, but warmhearted and basically a decent guy. I expected the film to explore concepts of free will in a digital creature and this would have led into notions of consent in a relationship with this digital being. There is exploration of those themes, even going so far as to introduce a volunteer human computer-love enthusiast who will act as a body surrogate. It strongly echoes Blade Runner 2049's scenes, but is a bit more straightforward. There's just human-level intelligent machines to deal with, not human-level intelligent machines who don't even know they're human-level intelligent machines (as in Blade Runner.)

Anyway, I sort of can't get over the ickyness of a human falling in some kind of love with a computer program. I code for a living, so computer systems are not quite so magical to me. This is sort of like showing Interstellar to a physicist though. It's close enough that I feel I have to comment but all of that is of course besides the point. I just can't get over the level of idiot, puppy-like innocence required to guilelessly react to the pre-canned quips of some futuristic Microsoft Sam. She's ones and zeros man! She'll probably install an update tomorrow and then start communicating only through latte art and you can't even figure out if this is some setting that got changed or if she needs to be reinstalled. Arg, okay, nerd-rant over!

So anyway, despite all of that, I found myself won over by this film. It side-steps a lot of the bigger questions by only showing the first few months of the relationship. Who has time to wonder about whether computers can consent when your silken-voiced OS is urging you to finally publish that book you've been working on? I feel the thesis of the film is that the main character's strange relationship with his computer is just an extension of the relationship humans have always had with machines: they improve our lives and we love them. In this case, the machine just says that it loves us back.

The film had the now-familiar low fi and pastel colored aesthetic. I felt it was a bit too twee at parts (the dude writes love letters for a living...) but it was heartfelt and affecting. A nice little film, kinder than you might expect.