If simplicity forms the premise of Andrew and Sam Zuchero’s Love Me, subtlety, however, is the last thing to constitute its payoff. Taking a gamut of tropes and running them through an equally variegated medley of possible scenarios, the film not only fails to convey the breadth of its inspirations, but also falters in convincing the viewer of their trenchancy. It’s easy, on paper, to admit the conceptual daring behind the possibility of burgeoning love between two inanimate objects — an ocean buoy equipped with artificial intelligence and a satellite intended to communicate the vestiges of a long-gone humanity to prospective alien visitors; less so, in practice, to behold the tiresome sputters through which this possibility plays out.
Headlining the Zucheros’ feature debut are Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, avatars for the buoy and satellite, respectively. Untold years after the extinction of all life on earth (precipitated no doubt by an apocalypse of humanity’s doing, sometime in the 21st century), the buoy awakens, and its (her?) attempts to communicate are rewarded when contact is made with the starry heavens. No explicit reason is given for this awakening, or for the buoy’s newfound lust for life, but what follows nevertheless is a process of recognition and romantic courtship between the two inanimate devices as they tussle with the problem of being sentient. As the buoy trawls through the self-affirming aisles of YouTube and settles on a channel by a blonde influencer named Deja (Stewart), it adopts her likeness while assuming the moniker “Me”; passing off as a lifeform to the curious satellite thus, she accords the latter the mannerisms of Deja’s boyfriend Liam (Yeun) while christening him “Iam.”
Not surprisingly, Me and Iam are not really sure what to make of themselves, and their flimsy identity markers quickly prove disheartening to their quest for authenticity. There are only so many Date Nights they can pantomime, only so many affectionate kisses they may perform for the imaginary camera, before disinterest sets in and the inability to live and breathe the supposed ardor of their human idols breeds contempt and frustration. The million-dollar question, however, is not why the androids aren’t able to dream of electric sheep, but why the Zucheros have stripped their dreams of electrification while conceivably endowing them with the capacity for agency and imagination. It’s not in the text-to-text interfaces that the possibility of love unfurls, but within the four walls of a metaverse simulacrum. But where is this simulacrum located? More accurately, who’s behind its creation and maintenance? It’s not so much a trivial question as it probes the reasons behind our protagonists’ lackluster emotional lives.
Without much to inject into these lives, and with their concerns squarely anodyne, Love Me stretches its bizarro premise into a grotesque showreel of corporate aesthetics, in which the avatars commingle, separate, and reconcile after — get this! — a billion years, right as the remnants of the earth make their inevitable way into the sun. Engineering pathos so precisely might have been excusable were the setup a fraction as realistic, but so headstrong is the screenplay’s obsession with its Millennial view of algorithms and social media that virtually nothing happens during this gaping hiatus: you’d think artificial intelligence would have iterated entire civilizations within a thousand years, much less a billion, but instead, its preoccupations are confined to either infinitesimal gestures (such as Iam assembling a shelf) or unexplained acts of will (such as him trying to conjure water within his metaverse silo out of nothing). Rather than serving as an exhibit of stunted anthropomorphism, Love Me veers closer to the nightmarish implications of object-oriented ontology wherein consciousness and intention alike are ascribed to the non-living.
But even this interpretation can’t quite settle the pressing matter of whom the film really is for. Is it a faithful test of the Dead Internet theory? A knowing lament for the digital imagination? Genesis à la Instagram Reels? More likely, the grandiosity of its post-apocalyptic concept plan was simply harnessed as stand-in for a more penetrating reflection on love in the time of bountiful artifice; but, like the nuptial between SB350 Smart Buoy and her orbital significant other, this marriage of the human and the cosmic barely coheres. The Zucheros do drop two sleights of hand later on, first in the shift to live action and then in a subsequent lovemaking sequence where Stewart and Yeun’s features morph ever so subtly in gender-bending ways. Yet with the basic ontological questions unanswered, these features register as little more than window dressing. The longer Love Me goes on — and admittedly its 90 minutes sometimes feel like 900 — the more twee its rendition of the sublime.
DIRECTOR: Sam Zuchero & Andrew Zuchero; CAST: Kirsten Stewart, Steven Yeun; DISTRIBUTOR: Bleecker Street; IN THEATERS: January 31; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 32 min.
Comments are closed.