Mark Reviews Movies: WIFELIKE

Wifelike, Paramount Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 11, 2022

In the future world of Wifelike, men have basically replaced women with artificially intelligent robots and turned those robots into domestic and sex servants. Real women still exist (They'd have to, if only because the extinction of humanity would be inevitable without them), although director James Bird's screenplay has one or maybe two of them within this story. By the way, one is a loyal and supportive wife, while the other possible candidate is a secretary, so take that as you will.

The robots in story, then, become metaphorical stand-ins for the humans they've replaced, and that feels like an unnecessary step in the movie's message-making. If it's even making a message, that is.

If that message exists, it's a simple one: These artificial intelligences have internal lives and deserve rights. Since the movie establishes that all of the robots within this world are created in the image of women, there's not much more thinking that needs to be done to get to Bird's point.

It is strange, though, that the movie seems far more comfortable examining the struggles and arguing in favor of artificial beings than it is even having a single living, breathing, human woman as a character with more than a couple lines of dialogue (Said dialogue, by the way, is how good a man that woman's husband is). This is more than a case of putting the cart in front of the horse. It's keeping the horse in the stable, parading the cart around with a lot of pride, and, yes, using the metaphor of a workhorse to describe women's role in society in the first place.

Bird's intentions are probably good. They're just woefully misguided—partly because of generic science-fiction conventions, such as the primary theme of the sentience and agency of artificially intelligent life, and partly because the screenplay is more interested in plot than its characters. It's a pretty predictable mystery about the origin and background of one robot, who's a replication of a robot-hunter's dead wife, and it's only during the movie's epilogue that it seems to have any interest in taking this allegory about a rising revolution toward its inevitable next step. By then, this story is finished, so Bird is clearly hoping for a sequel to actually tell that slightly more intriguing, albeit equally familiar, side of this tale.

Before it's a mystery or a thriller, though, it's a weird kind of wish-fulfillment. The story first revolves around William (Jonathan Rhys Meyers), an agent working in the eponymous company's division for retrieving stolen "companions," as the A.I. cyborgs are called here. He's so good at his job that the company's CEO (played by Stephen Lobo) has gifted William the gift of a companion that looks like his late wife. Meredith (Elena Kampouris) is that companion, and she comes home with William with only the goal to make him happy, keep him healthy, and satisfy his every desire.

That's why we get a couple of gratuitous sex scenes, as well as why Meredith—in addition to just about every other companion in this movie—walks around in short and tight-fitting dresses, frilly lingerie, or nothing at all. The point, of course, is that such exploitation of these beings is simply the way of this male-dominated world (In the screenplay's logic, there are no male robots because men want to dominate, fight, and kill—although they apparently don't want the promise of near-immortality that, from a certain perspective, the robots offer). At a certain point, too, this world's exploitation of robot women starts to look like the movie's exploitation of real actors. It doesn't quite get there, but it's close enough to give one pause about Bird's approach.

The plot has William hunting down stray companions and Keene (Fletcher Donovan), the leader of a A.I. rights organization (with William describing such illogical tactics that it's either an inconsistency or a give-away on the part of Bird's screenplay). Meanwhile, Meredith starts to realize she might have more and different memories of her past human life than William divulges, and when a masked man begins appearing in her dreams and telling her as much, she looks for evidence about the woman she once was.

This mystery isn't much of one, but its existence still does overwhelm all of the ideas that Wifelike could have otherwise explored. Instead, the movie doesn't seem certain what to do with its confused and mostly unnecessary metaphor.

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