Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: A buoy and a satellite meet on a post-humanity Earth. The satellite asks the buoy, “Are you a life form?” And the buoy answers, “Yes,” quickly scanning the dregs of the internet to offer up a lifelike image, landing on an influencer. A love story ensues.
There’s no disputing that “Love Me,” the debut feature of husband-and-wife filmmaking team Andy and Sam Zuchero, is unique. Is it unlike anything you’ve ever seen before? Kind of. It has shades of “WALL-E,” “Her,” the documentary “Good Night Oppy” and any other film in which a female robot powered by artificial intelligence is weirdly sexy.
The Zucheros’ movie also has the marketing-ready hook of casting two Oscar nominees with huge fan bases as the sentient machines who fall in love. Kristen Stewart plays the buoy, with Steven Yeun as the satellite sent into space as humanity’s digital tombstone, its time capsule orbiting the planet, checking for life forms. As their connection grows, the buoy becomes Me, and the satellite becomes I Am, first as Sims-like animated figures and then eventually, a billion years into their complicated situationship, “real” people (or at least real actors’ faces to look at).
This exploration of whether artificial intelligence can become “human” poses a lot of questions but doesn’t offer any answers. It’s a tricky film to try to make sense of, because there’s the nagging feeling that the movie doesn’t even.