'Love Me' is out there and sometimes gets there
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Try recommending a movie that takes place over billions of years and features a buoy and a satellite attempting a relationship based on everything they’ve gleaned from recorded history, but particularly the era of influencer-driven social media.
Pitch number two: Imagine “Wall-E” meets “Catfish,” with post-apocalyptic detachment crashing into a search for identity that is both desperate for connection and afraid to reveal the truth.
OK, last one: Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun know that there is something between them but struggle to understand both their individual characteristics and compatibility, especially in the context of everything they don’t process about the universe because they’re not actually real people.
If you’re still reading this, 1. Thanks! and 2. Perhaps you’re on board for something a little weird, sometimes grueling, and overall sticky enough to overcome its rough edges.
This is a movie that considers what future the present makes, which should neither be a revolutionary concept to anyone nor an idea that’s easily dismissed. (Science agrees; the film won the 2024 Sloan Prize, given annually to features focused on technology.) Eventually things get a little too theoretical, and as we spend more time with Stewart and Yeun (standing in for the buoy and satellite), a certain vagueness makes you want to ask, “What are you guys even talking about?” Maybe it’s fitting for a movie about technological items trying to understand human emotion to kinda drift away, or for it to feel like this exploration of the pursuit of internal and external validation is merely casting a line and searching, like many do. There are a lot of other aspects of human history and language and learning, you could argue, that might’ve factored in.
But it’s also got several moments where it clicks, like when the buoy and satellite don’t understand why they aren’t connecting about a social media post until it’s identified that satellite, who is also working hard to sift through all uses of words, wrote “You execute you” but meant “You do you,” and would’ve had something funny with a different crop. Communication is like that; sometimes we’re only off by a little, and sometimes that’s enough to seem uncrossable.
Written and directed by married first-time feature filmmakers Sam and Andrew Zuchero (the latter of whom made shorts called “Satellite” and “The Apocalypse,” which I haven’t seen but obviously suggests a certain consistency of ideas), “Love Me” seems like the kind of big swing that either leaves viewers cold and annoyed or totally transfixed on its wavelength. (In that regard it resembles the likewise probing but much superior “I Heart Huckabees” and perhaps the wildly overrated “Upstream Color.”) Or, like I was, both, landing somewhere in the middle.
B-
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