The premise of Her — a lonely man falls in love with his operating system — sounds like satire, and the film earns the right not to be one. Spike Jonze is not interested in cautionary tale; he is interested in what love actually is, what it requires, what it does to the people inside it. The fact that one of the people is an AI named Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson with extraordinary warmth and precision, turns out to matter less than you expect.
Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore with a particular kind of careful interiority — a man who writes other people’s intimate letters for a living and cannot manage his own. He lives alone in a version of Los Angeles that is warm and slightly diffuse, all earth tones and soft edges, a city that has been designed to feel just comfortable enough. The production design is doing real emotional work: this future is not dystopian. It is merely lonely in a way that is already recognizable.
The relationship between Theodore and Samantha develops with genuine tenderness. Jonze does not wink at it. The film asks — seriously, without hedge — whether the origin of a feeling changes its validity, and it does not answer cleanly. The ending arrives as a kind of reckoning that the film has been building toward without you noticing.
Arcade Fire’s score and the original songs by Karen O are exactly right. The whole thing is exactly right. It is a film that will leave you thinking about what you need from the people you are close to, which is always worth the time.
VERDICT — A film about loneliness that is genuinely warm. One of the best of its decade, and one of the few films about technology that is really about something else entirely.
POUR — Something light and slightly sweet. A mezcal with honey, or a glass of something sparkling.
MOOD — Tender. Reflective. Newly attentive to the people in the room.
Some films belong on the shelf. Find it on Blu-ray.
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