A heavily thought and emotion provoking film, a quiet treasure.
The film questions whether or not a happily-lonely life needs a cure:
This isn’t a film about AI or whether we can love a robot. It’s a film about whether or not we need a cure to a happily-lonely life. Alma begins happy in her loneliness, but after Tom, she is aware of the hole in her life. Tom’s existence is a cure to the illusion of happiness.
Have you ever felt this?
My first moment of familiarity in this film was when I began to understand why she was resisting Tom, her second reason was deeper (tied to a aborted pregnancy and her emotional armour around it) but her first reason was this life of purposeful solitude. And that I could identify with.
Recently I’ve come to love being around family and being around people (without romance) as something I can tie into my life. But before that, I was happy in my solitude as long as I was comfortable, not too stressed, and productive. And that’s what was familiar about Alma’s situation. And that she had built it herself.
It didn’t become obvious until she was debating with the robot about why she didn’t want to be happy. It should have been obvious sooner, but the romance was so potent I didn’t notice. I was more worried that the film would get too sexual, (also because I was in a family environment)
spoiler: it didn’t. It treated the sexual moments carefully and respectfully.
Is longing dangerous when you’ve found a livable balance?
There were other signs before Tom — in my life, too. Friends building families, the steady drip of media insisting romance is the endgame. But for me, the real pressure was quieter and more personal. It showed up in moments when I remembered what it felt like to be close to someone — not just physically — not eroticism, but a grief-like comparison to memories of intimacy. Not even sex, really. Just the weight of having once been touched, and the strange absence of that. I’d been on dating apps. Pointless. Mostly. But sometimes conversations cracked through, and I remembered I still had emotional capacity. Even then, I’d almost given up on the idea of being in a couple. Not out of cynicism — just… quiet resignation. So when I saw Alma debating happiness with a robot, I recognised it. You start to convince yourself that certain things are no longer necessary — or worse, that they’re no longer yours to want.
There’s an emotional montage, between her resisting Tom, to the end of the relationship, with sex in between. It was like a pure emotion montage, no room for thought, just feeling, a series events that were so full of feeling, that they ran together silencing my thoughts.
And the end of the relationship hit so hard, that the ending of the film didn’t feel like my ending of the film.
My ending of the film was the hole that Tom left in his absence. Except in the film he didn’t leave.
And her evaluation was that these robots are wrong. My evaluation would be that keeping them should be illegal no matter how much it hurts to lock-in that hole that he leaves in his absence.
The Hole is the Feature, not the Flaw:
My point is that the hole is the whole point of the product, because now she’s ready to heal with a real relationship
Maybe we don’t need machines that can love us. We need ones that can remind us we’re still capable of love.
he turned into a computer error 