Sundance is often a place of experimentation, and that’s one of the great things about it. The quite experimental sci-fi romance Love Me was one of the most intriguing titles at the festival because the premise is so out there: a buoy and a satellite fall in love. Okay, how’s that work? And why does the promo image feature beautiful, and very human, stars Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun? The answer is the problem. First-time filmmakers Sam & Andy Zuchero take a home run swing with an ambitious post-apocalyptic romance that never reaches the emotional heights or originality the filmmakers believe they have achieved.
Let’s get the praise out of the way first because there’s some good stuff to say about Love Me. Technically, this is a marvel of production for an indie film, utilizing multiple mediums including motion capture, animation, and live-action, and it all looks studio quality. Even the score is sweeping and romantic, whisking the audience across eons and into a rollercoaster romantic relationship. Sam & Andy suggested that movies like this will be the way of the future, and maybe that’s true on a visual front, but storytelling still matters and that’s where this film gets a failing grade.
In a clever sequence that reminds of Pixar’s Wall-E, we see the creation of our galaxy and that of Earth itself. Rapidly sprinting across millions of years, we see the Big Bang, the arrival of humans and the world today, then another flash, humanity is wiped out, then an Ice Age. It all happens in seconds and it’s pretty funny. Then, the sun returns. An ice thaw reveals a digital smart buoy (voiced by Stewart) that is eager to find something to communicate with. Looking into the sky, it sees a satellite (Yeun) tasked as a storage space for all of humanity’s collective knowledge. The satellite’s main charge is to inform any lifeform it encounters about Earth and what happened to humanity.
Desperate to not be alone anymore, the buoy reaches out to the satellite and their initial conversations through broken digital dialect is one of the movie’s cutest aspects, a rom-com of broken ones and zeroes. But the buoy misrepresents itself in order to trick the satellite, using the social media videos of vapid influencer Deja (also Stewart) to create an entirely new persona. The buoy is now Me, and the satellite slowly begins to accept its role as I am, a digital version of Deja’s real boyfriend Liam (Yeun). Drawn into a virtual world that replicates the couple’s apartment, they begin sharing a “life” together, crafting Blue Apron recipes for an audience that doesn’t exist, planning “Date Nights” that don’t actually lead to anyplace. Over the course of thousands of quesadilla nights, ice cream desserts, and episodes of Friends, they begin to act out the contours of a real human relationship. And as humans, we know that those happy moments aren’t forever. Eventually, he begins to bristle at the tight constraints of their union, while Me is unsure, knowing herself to be a fraud who is only playing at being human. If I am evolves, he’ll learn that Me is really just a buoy floating out in the water all by itself, with little to offer. Eventually, things get so awful that a split has to occur, giving both sides time to discover who they truly are without the other. We’ve all been there, right?
There are aspects of Love Me that feel shockingly real and true, and others that are like a thought experiment gone awry. Its commentary about our social media age and the corrosive effect it has on our sense of self is scattershot at best, and also feels strangely out of date? But the film also goes off on wildly uninteresting tangents, like when I am discovers how to create water (a lot of this stuff is never explained; shit just happens) and goes on a taste-testing binge. Enraged breakdowns allow both Stewart and Yeun to scream a lot, cry a lot, and dance a lot, but they don’t add anything substantive or say anything truly original. A big problem with the film is that, despite its unique premise, the romantic conflict has been done before and done better elsewhere. Strip out the sci-fi elements, the buoy and the satellite stuff, and what you have is one person whose lack of self worth leads to controlling behavior, and another who struggles to break free from it. Ultimately, the filmmakers have put a lot of the burden of blame on Me, which makes her grand epiphany hollow and unearned.
There are some interesting avenues that could’ve been explored to greater depth, such as humanity’s lasting legacy and impact. Me figures out who she wants to be by exploring Youtube videos, searching through Google, and more. What she finds is a wildly complex humanity that does everything for show, to get Likes and Follows. In a funny little exchange, the buoy and satellite try to impress one another with memes, in order to secure the only Like they could ever achieve from the other. When the satellite, saddened that the buoy didn’t offer a Like to his silly meme of a dog with a Cheetos bag on its head, it says “You didn’t like it, so you don’t like me.”
Love Me offers another challenge for Stewart and Yeun, two actors who have made taking on challenging roles a common thing. Both show vulnerable sides to themselves here, and occasionally have moments that burn raw with passion drawn from a personal place. Ultimately, they aren’t the film’s problem. It feels like a great idea for a short that people might’ve actually loved, but grew out of control into a curious experimental failure.