LOVE ME - Mark Reviews Movies

Love Me, Bleecker Street

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Review by Mark Dujsik | January 30, 2025

The premise of Love Me is admirably weird. It's a shame the story that results from it isn't nearly weird enough.

Co-writers/co-directors Sam and Andy Zuchero (who are married) announce the underlying ambitions of their feature debut from its prologue. Some text announces that it's five billion years ago, and in the void of space, a mass of heat compresses into a sphere with a smaller one orbiting it. The satellite revolves around the planet, as the planet revolves around an unseen sun, and time passes in a hurry. Water and land form. The land turns green. More time passes, and an asteroid strikes the planet, covering our view of the surface in a cloud of dust.

We know what's coming at this point, and sure enough, artificial illumination fills the space of large sections of the land and dots of it begin orbiting the planet. We see the lights and hear some music, but that time is only a brief one compared to what has come before it. Soon enough, the lights disappear, and some on-screen text showing the year passes by our near future. The history of humanity on Earth has been but several seconds, perhaps, in this sped-up history of the planet, and now, what story could possibly be told?

For the Zucheros, it's the story of what humans have left behind, which isn't much. Stuck at sea in the frozen water miles beyond a collapsing city, there is a buoy. It's a "smart" buoy, programmed to track temperatures, water levels, and other things necessary for the now-extinct species to keep tabs on such matters. It powers on again, after more than a hundred years of not being needed, and begins to scan its surroundings.

This is one of the two main characters of the story. The other is a satellite, passing through orbit just behind the line separating light from darkness, and calling out to greet anyone or anything that might happen to find what's left of Earth. Before we become too caught up in the details of these two devices, let's cut to the chase: This is a love story.

Again, that's weird. We'll take it, though, because, surely, this conceit—the romance between an artificially intelligent buoy and satellite—is a unique one. The movies rarely give us something genuinely novel—only unique within the terms of some genre or familiar setup. Here's one that's undeniably distinct, and we should be thrilled that a pair of filmmakers have found a way to surprise.

The rest of it is less surprising. Eventually, the buoy, which will soon begin to call itself "Me" and sound a lot like Kristen Stewart, responds to the satellite. It eventually refers to itself as "Iam" and sounds like Steven Yeun. Me desperately wants to talk to Iam, but after realizing Me isn't a life form, the satellite keeps going on its way. The buoy looks for a way to convince Iam that it is, indeed, alive, because it certainly feels that way to the buoy.

Most of the story takes place inside a virtual world of sorts, where Me, which fashions its look and speech and personality on a social media influencer named Deja (Stewart, in physical form), and Iam, which becomes modeled after Deja's romantic partner Liam (Yeun, naturally), play the part of two people in love. Well, they're cheaply animated (intentionally so) avatars of two humans, who re-create scenes from Deja and Iam's life together. It's enough for Me, but Iam gradually realizes just how fake the situation is and, more importantly, feels to it.

What's strangest of all, perhaps, about a movie so oddly devised as this one is how shallow and restricted it comes to be. The two characters are stuck inside an apartment—a similarly inexpensive 3-D model of one, basically, at first and a more realistic-looking one later. They go through the motions of having a relationship, and once Iam discovers it's not enough for it—or him, at this point—to really grow as a person or at least a consciousness, Me starts to take that personally. If it's not enough, than the buoy or the now-less-artificial entity known as Me must not be enough.

There are clearly some big ideas—albeit not nearly as significant as the ones surrounding this decreasingly fake relationship—within this tale. At what point do artificial intelligences like Me and Iam stop being artificial and can be acknowledged as sentient beings? Are all human relationships just a series of patterns and routines, and what about romantic love makes that kind of bond any different, if it even is? Does the connection between a buoy and a satellite even matter within the context of doomed planet, or does that inevitable doom, by way of the Milky Way's star expanding, make this the only thing that actually does matter?

The questions suggested by the movie are more fascinating than the story within it, which just plays out like a romantic melodrama with ups, downs, absences, reunions, and a lot of sentimentality substituting for any development of character or the ideas in the backdrop. Love Me starts with unlimited potential, but it limits itself in disappointing ways.

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