CinemaSerf

Mar 27, 2022

7.0

Aside from being a very handsome man, Dan Stevens herein proves he can also make a decent fist of playing a German robot too! Annoying, isn't he? Maren Eggert is a scientist who, in order to secure funding, agrees to take part in an experiment by which she is partnered with an android programmed to satisfy her "every" need. Naturally sceptical, she has him in her apartment and they embark on quite a few lively escapades as their relationship develops, and he is introduced - with varying degrees of success - to her family and friends. It's a gently paced comedy, this - with a fun script, two really engaging performances and in a curious sort of fashion, it is a little though provoking. If we could order our ideal partner from Amazon, just how perfect would we want them to be? The ending was just a touch to cheesy for me, but overall I still quite enjoyed it.

Summary: 7/10: thoughtful, well-acted sci-fi that questions what love and longing really mean in an age when companionship might be manufactured to order. This is another awesome film in the growing catalog of movies that asks the question: what are the possibilities for emotional connection between humans and androids? The science fiction romance subgenre has been dominated for decades by fembots designed to fulfill male fantasies, but Maria Schrader's film crucially reverses those gender dynamics, creating space for different questions and observations. For three weeks, she must live with Tom (Dan Stevens), a humanoid robot designed to be her perfect partner. Maria Schrader does a great job serving the narrative without getting in the way. The pacing is good, the cinematography and music serve the story, never overwhelming the central relationship. Dan Stevens creates a really credible android with just enough inappropriate facial expressions to make it believable that he's not quite human. The uncanniness is subtle, perfectly calibrated; you can't quite put your finger on why Tom seems slightly off, but the wrongness registers. And Maren Eggert, who is absolutely resistant to the relationship in the beginning, develops a character arc that seems real enough, albeit a little too compressed. She eventually manages to teach her android that human relationships are never neat, never tidy, never predictable, and ultimately, probably not programmable. Eggert won the Berlin Film Festival's Best Acting Performance award for the role, and the film itself won four German Film Awards including Best Film. The film's conclusion remains appropriately open-ended, as ambiguous as the hard problem of consciousness itself, refusing easy answers about whether artificial beings can truly feel or whether human loneliness justifies the creation of synthetic companions. Worth the watch for yet another take on human-android relationships, this time from a female perspective too often absent from the genre.