Love Me review: "Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun's new sci-fi romance is ambitious but ultimately underwhelms"
Jan. 26, 2024Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun do their best with uneven material in an ambitious sci-fi romance that ultimately underwhelms.
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Every so often, along comes a film that’s so ambitious you just can’t help wishing its execution lived up to its central idea. Writer/director duo Sam and Andy Zuchero take an admirably big swing with their feature debut Love Me, but it never engages emotionally in the way this kind of material needs to.
There’s something reminiscent ofWALL*Ein its sentient-machines-in-love premise. In the far-flung future, a melting ice cap frees a ‘smart buoy’ that’s been trapped on what was once Earth for centuries. This buoy begins interacting with a satellite whose job it is to teach any visitor about life on this now-uninhabited planet.
The casting of Stewart and Yeun (who play Me and Iam’s avatars as well as the social-media couple that inspired them) also leaves you willing this experiment to work. Both are eminently watchable, but here struggle with some pretty leaden dialogue. Sure, there’s the argument that they’re talking the way AI programs would, but that doesn’t make it go down any easier. Similarly, an extended section in which their characters are rendered in rudimentary CG has the distracting effect that you’re watching a cheapo animation, regardless of the intent behind it.
Every so often, there are moments that leap out - a neat visual, an interesting take on a sex scene - and it’s filled with material that could get you talking (how far are you judging your own happiness by someone else’s metrics?). But it ultimately feels a bit throwaway, its ideas never quite coalescing into a fully satisfying watch. It’s hard to escape Black Mirror comparisons, but Love Me lacks the emotional resonance of similarly themed episodes like ‘San Junipero’ and ‘Hang the DJ’.
The frequent recourse to online viral videos grates too, especially at feature length. There’s probably a decent short buried in here that – unlike its protagonists – hasn’t survived being stretched out over an extended period of time.
Love Me’s release date is currently TBC.
For more from Sundance, read ourA Real Pain review.
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I’m the Editor at Total Film magazine, overseeing the running of the mag, and generally obsessing over all things Nolan, Kubrick and Pixar. Over the past decade I’ve worked in various roles for TF online and in print, including at GamesRadar+, and you can often hear me nattering on the Inside Total Film podcast. Bucket-list-ticking career highlights have included reporting from the set of Tenet and Avengers: Infinity War, as well as covering Comic-Con, TIFF and the Sundance Film Festival.
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