This review is based on a screening at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.
When describing Love Me – a post-humanity romance between a satellite orbiting a ravaged Earth and an artificially intelligent buoy in the frozen waters near the remains of New York City – the first and most obvious comparison that comes to mind is Pixar’s WALL-E. The similarities extend to the design elements too, from the buoy’s rusty yellow shell and adorable, large-aperture eyes, to the airborne satellite’s heavenly blue glow. But the overlap begins and ends with these superficial flourishes (or perhaps direct inspirations), since the innate humanity of WALL-E’s robot characters is a given. Love Me, meanwhile, is a probing look at what it might take to bring a pair of techno-beings to a human level of understanding and self-awareness, and it works wonders as a snappy, saccharine, and occasionally scary reflection of our contemporary digital world.
When it isn’t unfolding in screenlife segments on a Google-esque interface, Love Me is a scrappy, VFX-heavy film that takes full advantage of its existence in the uncanny valley. Its janky buoy – who, upon attaining a base level of consciousness, dubs herself “Me” – straddles the worlds of animation and live-action, but given its rusty, cycloptic design, this is never a problem. The same can be said of the cubic satellite, who chooses the name “Iam” (or “I am”). As a descendant of the Voyager series, it houses humanity’s last remaining artifacts and knowledge in digital form (which is to say: the vast majority of the internet) as it circles the Earth in anticipation of some future lifeform that may stumble upon the planet.
When the two pieces of technology find one another, they begin scouring the world wide web — seemingly housed in Iam’s database — for information on how to communicate and what it means to be, until Me – who claims to be a sentient being so Iam will spend time with her – suggests they adopt the appearance and personalities of a pair of early 21st century lifestyle vloggers, Deja (Kristen Stewart) and Liam (Steven Yeun). As they proceed to to use a shared digital space (akin to the metaverse), much of the film unfolds in the form of a romantic-dramedy with digital avatars resembling Stewart and Yeun, who deliver tremendously nuanced vocal performances as, essentially, artificial intelligences attempting to be human.
Rather than a familiar tale of androids reckoning with their robotic natures, the new-media roadmap laid out before Me and Iam places Love Me in the distinctly familiar realm of online expectations and the pressures to perform life experiences for a camera. They learn about laughter from YouTube videos of babies, and meaning from Instagram memes. Filmmakers Sam and Andy Zuchero (a real-life married couple) disguise a hilarious study of humanity’s digital footprint as a cutesy rom-com, unfolding in a digital apartment with modernist designs, as Me and Iam repeat gestures and online “challenges” ad nauseam in the hopes of understanding feelings and interpersonal experiences.
How long would it actually take a piece of technology to become fully self-aware, at a level indistinguishable from human intelligence? Realistically, a very long time, but Love Me is also a film that – despite being rooted in familiar genres – also decouples itself from our understanding of time. Its introduction is ingeniously tongue-in-cheek, capturing, from a stellar distance, the formation and evolution of Earth over billions of years, during which the entirety of human existence is but a comparative blip. From there on out, the skeletons of frozen skyscrapers give way to alternating eras of frigid oceans and scorching winds, meticulously rendered, but beyond the realm of anything we’ve ever perceived or experienced (one cloud, in particular, resembles a continental tornado).
These are the gargantuan parameters in which Me and Iam’s tumultuous love story unfolds. And yet, Love Me remains a thoughtful rumination on human relationships as we understand them, albeit from a vastly different point of view. At times, it mirrors the experiences of people on the autism spectrum, who might struggle to connect with behaviors deemed socially mandatory. It’s a charming and deeply human tale, emerging in imaginative hues from beneath an intentionally inhuman exterior.
Love Me’s humor is born from whip-smart timing. The Zucheros have tremendous control of the characters’ movements in their animated segments, which they capture using a floating digital “camera” that employs the hallmarks of third-person shooters. But Stewart and Yeun are equally attuned, as voice actors, to the tragicomedy in every scene. Yeun reaches a place of heartrending despondency as Iam, while Me is arguably the perfect role for Stewart, who – as Me impersonating Deja – spends much of Love Me analyzing her own speech patterns and finding the meaning behind them. It’s as though she were exploring a kind of psychological muscle memory, à la the recent interview where the actor recalls a previous role by doing an impression of herself.
Whether the actors are voicing machines or digital avatars, or whether they’re playing hyperactive vloggers or curious live-action embodiments of A.I. – these latter versions arrive with a sense of weight and momentum – they’re always a treat to watch, anchoring us during a tale of universal chaos, and time spanning infinitely outward.
