The last thing that academic Alma (Maren Eggert) wants, following a messy breakup with a colleague, is a man. But in order to gain funds for her own research, she is persuaded to take part in a trial: for three weeks, she must live with Tom (a deft comic performance from Downton Abbey’s Dan Stevens), a humanoid robot that has been precision-tooled to be her perfect companion.
Alma’s natural cynicism seems well placed. Tom has an unblinking LED-blue gaze and a database full of cornball compliments – “Your eyes are like two mountain lakes,” he informs her, with the same tone of polite interest that he uses when calculating the optimal angle of safety for her car seat. But Tom is programmed to learn from her responses. And even though, or perhaps because, Alma shuts him in a cupboard along with her ironing board and rejects his offer of a petal-strewn scented bath, he starts to more closely resemble the kind of man she could live with, or even love.
There’s unexpected depth to this smart, Berlin-set relationship comedy. Unlike the similarly themed AI/human romance, Spike Jonze’s Her, I’m Your Man opts for an unshowy, real-world aesthetic and a less cynical outlook. But it asks pertinent questions about loneliness and a world in which algorithms can know us better than our human partners ever will.
