As technology evolves, our culture evolves with it. This change in culture means a change in our perceptions of relationships. In a new age of dating apps and matchmaking websites, it’s no wonder that there’s been a recent sci-fi tradition of romance stories between man and artificial intelligence, and of films exploring the interconnection between love and technology. From Deckard and Rachael in Blade Runner, to Black Mirror episodes, and subversive examinations of sex such as Ex Machina, there is a fixation in contemporary media with the feminine android. Maria Schrader thankfully flips the script in I’m Your Man, offering her own exciting and warm take on AI romance through her robotic male lead.
We open the film on Alma (Maren Eggert), a scientist working towards a research grant for a study she’s looking to conduct. Alma reluctantly accepts an offer to participate in an experiment in exchange for her grant: for three weeks, she agrees to live with a humanoid robot, Tom (Dan Stevens), who’s designed to best fit her ideal needs for a romantic life partner. As an independent, cynical spirit, Alma initially struggles living with Tom. He systematically organizes her chaotic mess of documents and notes, cooks her perfect breakfasts, and showers her with compliments. He’s meticulously, and oftentimes pathologically, perfect. Alma finds domestic life with him performative and vapid to her intellectual needs. As their relationship grows more complicated, the two eventually find out that they have a lot to learn from one another.
With a setting that is advanced enough for uncannily humanoid love bots but close enough to identify with our modern sensibilities, Schrader paints a soft sci-fi portrait of future Berlin that hits the same notes as Spike Jonze’s Her. Though equally melancholic and brimming with isolationism, I’m Your Man distincts itself with its comedic approach to processing its innate existentialist themes. Upon first meeting Alma, Tom glitches and repeats the same phrase over and over again, and while initially a funny image, it pulls the curtains down to reveal the manufactured feeling of their first meet cute. Alma is encouraged to fabricate the details of their backstory, for “there is no future without a past.” Schrader is able to deliver so many poignant ideas with a satirical edge that keeps us just as pessimistic as Alma as she enters this strange bond.
It is a testament to Dan Stevens’ strong performance that despite how unnatural his love and devotion feels through Alma’s perspective, I was always rooting for him. Maybe I didn’t want him to be with her in the end, but I certainly wanted him to find some sort of meaning in these three weeks. Stevens is charming and disarmingly handsome, but there’s a quirkiness to the way he moves. He can deliver a swooning declaration of love, but it will always feel stilted. Somewhere in the film’s second act, though, he learns from Alma and grows into someone more complex. Normally, sci-fi films are afraid to validate the simulated feelings characters like Tom feel in favor of thematic ambiguity, but I’m Your Man makes a bold claim: those emotions are absolutely real and fundamental to what makes human existence so special. When in couple’s therapy, while Alma shuts down Tom’s emotions as calculated programming, the film makes space for his voice — this uncompromising empathy is ultimately what makes Schrader’s film that much more distinct from many stories of man and machine.
Through subverting traditionally gendered sci-fi tropes, Schrader is able to innovate a well trodden concept and imbue it with her own viewpoints on love, human consciousness, and independence. There’s a strong optimistic contrast that cuts through the many stories that have come before it, and it’s embedded in the quiet moments of interrogating the meaning of life that Alma and Tom share together. I’m Your Man begins as a story we’ve seen before, but ultimately shines when it unfolds as a story not of romance, but of companionship and self love.
