Her (2013)

User Review

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  Barneyonmovies

  8 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: Could a relationship with a chatbot ever be real? Set-up like a romcom where a man giddilly falls in love with an artificial intelligence, Spike Jonze's 'Her,' will almost convince you. But ultimately it delivers a brilliant message about the hollowness of such a connection, and of a world where anyone might find solace in something so fake.
  
  That starts right from the off, as we meet Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix) living a depressingly solitary life where he spends more time interacting with technology than other human beings. His job involves writing emotional thoughts for people who have outsourced their messages for loved ones, his voice assistant is constantly in his ear running his life, and when he gets home he just plays video games on his own. That's all furthered by the world-building too, as Jonze films a slightly modernised and clinical, impersonal version of an American city with walls of glass and artificial lighting.
  
  With all that in place, when he gets his new operating system Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), it really does feel like a fresh breath of humanity in a soulless existence, them the way Jonze writes their developing relationship - not to mention the way Phoenix acts so gleeful - makes it seem like a real romance. Before long they start sharing intimate moments and their innermost thoughts, they laugh and joke together, and he even introduces her to friends.
  
  But before long the insanity is exposed, as Samantha goes offline for updates, they try to have sex using a surrogate woman, and Samantha eventually reveals she's talking to hundreds of other people in the same capacity. This causes Theodore to crash back down to reality, and thankfully realise that he needs a real human connection. That's a vital moral to a story set in such dire circumstances, especially as those circumstances only reflect our reality more and more by the day.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: Though he does a good enough job of convincing us here, Phoenix has never been the best at playing characters in a way that feels truly earnest.
  
  VERDICT: Spike Jonze's 'Her,' brilliantly makes a cautionary tale about the importance of real human connection from a giddy romcom.

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