Kristen Stewart Just Gave Us The Weirdest Sci-Fi Movie of 2024

Summary

• On January 19, a new sci-fi movie, Love Me, starring Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun, was presented at Sundance.
• Critics have given it mixed reviews, and the reason for this is the unusual nature of the narrative.
• Love Me is a sci-fi allusion to how people project their own false expectations onto romantic relationships.

Kristen Stewart, who rose to worldwide fame as Bella Swan in Twilight, has long since overcome the curse of ace casting. Now, alongside none other than Robert Pattinson, she stars in complex dramatic roles alongside other acclaimed actors and under the direction of world-renowned filmmakers.

Each of her new roles is incredibly arty, and the projects she is involved with are known for their experimentalism. Sometimes so unconventional that the result is mixed reviews from critics and audiences.

Such was the case with her new sci-fi film Love Me, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 19. It's been less than a week, but critics have already literally fallen into two camps, either praising it to the skies or calling it a complete failure (the film's Rotten Tomatoes score is now only 50%).

But that only adds to the extraordinary charm of Love Me, because it's not so much a sci-fi movie as it is an attempt to understand the concept of love and affection.

An Eccentric Tale of Robotic Love

Love Me was directed and written by filmmaking duo Sam and Andy Zuchero. The premiere was a feature debut for them, and already very significant, as the movie proved to be incredibly ambitious, being a chamber story with only two actors, Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun.

On the one hand, the plot is quite banal, as it follows the well-worn trope of whether or not romantic feelings can arise between robots. Yes, it immediately conjures up associations with WALL-E and Eve, except that the design of the two robots in Love Me is much more interesting: like the droids in Star Wars, the characters' actual 'bodies' are not anthropomorphic, but that doesn't stop us from empathizing with them, as their actions speak much louder for themselves.

According to the story, humanity was wiped out long ago, and now, a millennium or more later, the post-apocalyptic Earth is traversed by two lonely remnants of the fallen civilization: the SB350 Smart Buoy, which calls itself 'Me' and is tasked with finding connections, and the satellite, which calls itself 'Iam' and has the mission of finding the remaining life forms.

Notably, Iam sees Me as a living being and gives her access to what's left of the human Internet content, providing her with role models and a new identity. And so begins a love story between two artificial intelligences trying to learn from the dead what it's like to have feelings.

A Story That Is Not a Cautionary Tale

Essentially, the film alludes to how a media space built on algorithms shapes our perceptions of ourselves and others. Just as Tinder imposes certain standards, Buoy, played by Stewart, takes on the personality of a once-living influencer, and Satellite, played by Yeun, takes on the personality of her husband.

What makes Love Me such a spectacular film, however, is not the idea that external factors shape our personality, resulting in the loss of our original identity — we've seen all that in Black Mirror anyway. The peculiarity is that the starting point is our feelings, the main characteristic of a living being. And it is these feelings that make us turn to external sources and adapt to them in order to please someone with whom we want to establish a connection.

Love Me is a story about our feelings and ways of perceiving the world, and the importance of the technological aspect to the story is ultimately decided by the viewers themselves.