Love Me begins 5 billion years ago, with the creation of the Earth, and it ends more than a billion years in the future, as our planet is swallowed up by the sun. That’s not giving away anything, as the film isn’t really about the fate of the Earth. It’s a love story about a so-called “smart buoy†in the year 2600 or so, stuck in the frozen wasteland just outside of what used to be New York, that one day catches a signal from a satellite and tries to respond to it. The satellite contains within it the memories and legacies of humanity, long gone from the universe. It’s looking for a lifeform. The buoy, looking to connect with anything, pretends to be one so the satellite will stop and talk to it.
If you listen closely to the two objects’ robotic, halting, static-filled sounds, you might make out the voices of Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun. But they’re not there just as voices. As the buoy continues its ruse, it scours the digital world for examples of a lifeform and settles on the ancient videos of a social media influencer named Deja (played by Stewart) and her boyfriend Liam (played by Yeun). The buoy, now calling itself Me, and the satellite, now calling itself IAm, are soon trying to forge a relationship based on imitating and repeating what was seen in Deja’s videos. They choose sim-style avatars of themselves, and live a virtual life of endless date nights, Blue Apron-sponcon dinner prep, and performative cuddling. “In here, we can live,†they observe. “But what is life?â€
Love Me begins quite promisingly, with directors Sam and Andy Zuchero effectively telling their story visually while finding a bleak poetry in the buoy’s lonely, frozen reverie and its initially brief, melancholy encounters with the satellite. These scenes play like a more emo version of Wall-E crossed with a bit of A.I. Artificial Intelligence, but no matter. There’s beauty in the inanimate objects’ inarticulate longing.
When Stewart and Yeun’s avatars take center stage, however, Me and IAm’s constant searching for the essence of life can start to get wearying. There are ideas here, of course. We watch them repeat the cycles of domesticity over and over again, going so fast as to eventually become beams of light. There are questions about the authenticity of a life lived in imitation of others. Or life lived as a performance to others. All of these should evoke self-reflection in humans of the present day, but the filmmakers don’t so much explore these ideas as just underline them. The repetitive, snake-eating-its-tail quality of the dialogue doesn’t do the actors any favors either, while the purposefully janky animated passages flatten their performances — perhaps intentionally, since these characters are just discovering complexity, slowly realizing the phoniness of their lives.
There’s more to the film than that. We do eventually see Stewart and Yeun inhabit their actual bodies onscreen (there’s even a blue light sex scene) when Me and IAm’s relationship evolves yet again. But many of the same cinematic challenges remain: Give an actor a flat character, and they’ll give you a flat performance. Movies do existentialism really well, because a glance, a gesture, a mood can often reveal so much that words can’t. But Love Me, despite having two incredibly expressive actors at its center, remains furiously literal-minded in its questioning. And unfortunately, the more questions this picture asks, the more maudlin and shallow it becomes.
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