The new movie Love Me takes place over 10 billion years and stars only two actors who don’t play humans. It’s part nature film, part animation, part stage drama, and incredibly ambitious and dense both in scope and theme. Written and directed by Sam and Andy Zuchero, it’s a film that attempts to capture the entire scope of celestial existence in a tight, 90-minute package, while also letting a modern audience experience it in a very specific way. Does it all work all the time? No. But it works more often than not, and you can’t take your eyes off it because you are constantly in awe of what you’re seeing, for any number of reasons.
The two actors in the film are Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun and they play a buoy and a satellite respectively. Yes, you read that right. Sometime long after humans have gone extinct from Earth, these two objects are all that remain and, poetically and beautifully, strike up a friendship. It’s here where the film really feels like Pixar’s masterpiece, Wall-E, down to the robotic back and forths and sweeping, gorgeous shots of an empty Earth.
Love Me would be pretty boring, though, if it was merely two objects talking to each other in voiceover. So while the movie starts there, things quickly evolve. The buoy creates an identity, “Me,” and the satellite chooses “I Am.” With the entirety of human existence accessible digitally, the two begin learning, experimenting, and, eventually, meeting in a digital metaverse as human avatars. As we said, this movie is unique.
Once Me and I Am meet, Love Me instantly gets more complex and divisive. The film becomes a mirror of life in 2024 from a hopelessly innocent point of view as the characters adopt the online personas of modern-day influencers (which is where Yeun and Stewart primarily come in). They begin to live life the way they see others did it on the internet, blissfully unaware of how performative everything can be online. For these characters though, it works, because they’re technology. They don’t have a genuine self so anything is better than nothing. It’s a captivating thematic conundrum.
After a first act that feels like an episode of Planet Earth, the second act of Love Me is presented largely as computer animation, which Stewart and Yeun performed with motion capture. At first, it’s interesting, quirky, and fun. You almost can’t believe the movie went there. But eventually, it goes on a little too long and starts to feel less like a modern movie and more like watching someone play a boring video game. Mostly, this is because the animation is so simple. It’s not bad; in fact, it’s much more emotional and expressive than you’re probably imagining. However, it’s just much less detailed than what audiences are used to in terms of animation or visual effects these days. So, because the sequence takes up a huge chunk of the story, the format lost me a bit.
And, frankly, it never really truly won me back. While Love Me’s third act does get away from the animation and the character evolutions make total logical sense, so many ideas are being juggled that it’s hard to keep up. Me is struggling with her identity, among other things. I Am attempts to uncover the truth of their meta-reality, while also creating a world for himself. Both experience life-changing existential crises. Meanwhile, real-life time is passing on Earth and impacting everything. So we’re thinking about the environment, the meaning of self, the meaning of life, what’s real, what’s not, how we live our own lives, the permanence of digital identities, and on and on.
Neither the characters nor the film ever fully grasp any of this. Which, when you think about it, is more than understandable. Thankfully, the film smartly focuses back on the romance at hand to bring it all home. Stewart and Yeun, as one might expect, are excellent in the film—they are expressive, vibrant, broken, and joyous. Each gets to show the full scope of human emotion from a wholly unique point of view. And when Love Me is about that love and relationship, it’s at its best. When it’s about something more, it’s still pretty damn good, but just not as strong.
Love Me might start as a Wall-E adjacent story of what a romance between two objects could be in the harshness of our reality but it goes way beyond that. It’s a film unlike anything you’ve ever seen, for better and worse, with an ambition and voice that’s all its own. It’s rooted in science. It’s rooted in technology. And it’s rooted in the belief that love, more than anything, is what makes life worth living. Love Me won’t be for everyone, but if you take it for a ride, there’s no way you’ll ever forget it.
Love Me had its world premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. It does not yet have distribution.
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