Let no one claim all the stories have been told. Without doing a lick of research, I feel fairly certain that until filmmaking partners Sam and Andy Zuchero cooked up the idea for their sci-fi romance Love Me, there had been exactly zero films made about a buoy catfishing a satellite after life on Earth has died out.
The love story between buoy and satellite is set in between two extinction events: one that apparently happens in 2027 (yikes) and a final, fateful date with the sun 7 billion years later. Their meet-cute almost doesn’t get off the ground. When the satellite – orbiting the planet in search of life-forms that it might educate on the history of now-defunct humanity on Earth – encounters a “smart buoy” bobbing aimlessly in the ocean, they start a conversation. But when the buoy admits it’s not a life-form, the satellite shuts the conversation down, part of its programming. It’s an instructive moment for the buoy; next time they meet up, the buoy knows the right answer to keep the satellite’s interest: “I am life-form.”
To become life, the buoy crawls the internet for inspiration and builds a persona, heavily adopted from a presumably long-dead social media influencer named Deja (Stewart). With her self-love checklist and “Date Night 2.0” sponcon activities with fiancé Liam (Yeun), Deja will be a familiar type for anyone who’s spent an hour on Instagram. But the buoy – which has renamed itself, cutesily, Me – is hooked on Deja’s performative version of humanity. Indeed, Me doesn’t know any other version. It’s no wonder Deja’s motivational slogans – “you are special, you are worthy, you are you” – would resonate with a smart device in search of a personality.
Courting now, Me and the satellite, newly dubbed Iam, enter a digital space with avatar forms in the same likeness as Deja and Liam, and playact the same routines, the same catchphrases. (In addition to playing source humans Deja and Liam, Stewart and Yeun also voice the satellite and buoy’s digital avatars; eventually, as Me and Iam further evolve, they enter the frame in their human forms.) In the glow of a Ring Light, they speak as if to a camera, to an audience that doesn’t exist. But Iam (a more advanced technology, one presumes) intuits something wrong and gently challenges Me on their routines. The buoy and the satellite have their first fight.
<pLove Me feels a little like the middle floors of a Charlie Kaufman film: a seriously cool concept, but missing his basement-level rattling weirdness or scrape-the-sky soulfulness. It won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, awarded to features with a focus on science or technology; the science-y stuff is what thrills most here. Less inspired, in a film about two technologies mimicking human behavior, are the observations being made about human behavior. Love Me mostly just reinforces what we all around know: that social media is unhealthy and that it’s tough but rewarding to let yourself be vulnerable. Of machines, we learn little. Stewart and Yeun hold the eye – there’s something likably “let’s try everything,” theatre workshop-like about how they bounce off each other – but the film overinvests in their human avatars. If Love Me wants us to consider the inner life of inanimate objects, that message gets muddled when we’re mostly looking at these two very alive actors.
This article appears in January 31 • 2025.