Sundance 2024 Review: “Love Me” – A Heartless Love Story!

Romantic films can be a difficult genre to grasp successfully because of its own conventions that filmmakers feel they have to utilize in order to tell an “authentic” story. These may be tropes like “enemies to lovers,” falling in love with your best friend, a “meet-cute” that develops into something stronger, or even no matter how old one gets, love will never die. Even when using a romantic convention, filmmakers can create a revolutionary story based on their execution that feels fresh or nuanced to separate it from other submissions in the genre.

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The general idea for a successful romance is to try not to be like all the films before, find your own direction and voice. This is in fact, the exact message in Sam and Andy’s Zuchero’s film Love Me, that premiered at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. However, even with slight variations on the typical romance tale, this movie still finds a way to go against its central theme and feel like every other unsuccessful romance film, lacking true heart or a distinct voice.

In a post-apocalyptic world where Earth is no longer inhabitable, a smart buoy named Me (voiced by Kristin Stewart) wakes up and finds itself in the oceans of Earth. An intelligent satellite (Steven Yeun) named “Iam” finds the buoy and they begin speaking to each other to try to understand who they are and what Earth was like when humans inhabited it hundreds, to eventually, billions of years ago. Me finds videos online of Deja and her husband Liam, vlogging their perfect marriage and relationship with “date night” and marriage proposal videos. Thus begins Me to develop her own “perfect” relationship in the future with “Iam.”

In the same way that Me tries to recreate moments in Deja’s videos between her and Iam, repeating their lines and doing exactly what they do, Sam and Andy Zuchero attempt to say and express a lot of their thematic ideas verbally rather than by showing the audience. As a result, the message of the film comes across with little emotion or feeling behind any of the characters’ interactions or realizations about what it means to truly be human.

They use various filmmaking styles like CGI, computer animation, and scenes between real Kristin Stewart and Steven Yeun that slowly display the change in Me and Iam’s relationship from fake to “real” but even this decision is not enough to make the film feel unique in its own right. The film focuses on how creating a fake persona of oneself that is not true to who one really is will only make one unhappy in the long run.

To be true to oneself, one must love in your own way, not in the way you see others displaying their love and affection for one another, which is probably not authentic behind the camera. This concept of “just be yourself,” to be loved although true is so overdone in films and for it to resonate with audiences, the movie must be felt by them, which Love Me fails to do.

In the last decade, artificial intelligence has become a prime character in cinema, discussing the dangers of it and prompting the question as to whether AI can ever truly feel the way humans do. Trying to convince audiences that machines with no real soul within their wires and mechanisms can feel the way humans do is already absurd, but that doesn’t mean it will be impossible to root for Me and Iam.

By the end of the film, Me and Iam have discovered they must not compare themselves to humans to define their love but instead do it in their own way. Although admirable, the two AI characters still base their actions and motivations on how humans go about life, which counters the message being sent to audiences. It seems like Sam and Andy Zuchero bit off more than they could chew but felt that in the end love is found so that must be good enough, right?

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Even Kristin Stewart and Steven Yeun could not save this lifeless script. Love Me traps itself in the exact bubble it is trying to get away from and proves that it doesn’t matter how “different” a love story is trying to be, if the audience isn’t feeling the love, the story means nothing.

The online element in the film that is trying to show what love really looks like, with clips of animals hugging humans, adults kissing, and family members hugging each other, feels anything but knowing all of these people set up a camera first to capture “real life” instead of just living in it. Love Me is a frustrating film that becomes everything it is trying not to be.

‘Love Me’ Rating – 1.5/5

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