Movie Review: Her

By Jonathan Yu

Her

Sci-Fi, Romance (M18)
Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara
125min
(4 out of 5 stars)

Spike Jonze’s sincere, eccentric, and sometimes funny Her plays like a modern day Pygmalion. Can you love something that doesn’t quite exist? The sharply conceived sci-fi romance spends a little over two hours tackling this provocative question and lets us draw our own conclusions.

Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix) is a good-hearted but distant man who makes his living writing personalised cards and letters for people too busy for such sentiments. Still putting his life back together from the ruins of his marriage with ex-wife Catherine (Rooney Mara), the pieces converge in an artificially intelligent Operating System on his computer.

The Operating System (voiced by a husky Scarlett Johansson) names herself Samantha mere seconds after she is installed. Her extraordinary ability to empathise and make Theodore laugh presents a striking backdrop against the heartache of his inability to understand where his marriage has gone wrong.

As Samantha and Theodore forge a deeper relationship, their feelings transform into something profound that neither seem able to comprehend. The operating system’s development of emotion, or the simulation of it, presents a complication as the duo grapples with the question of what it means to be human.

Ensnared in the age of technology and androids ourselves, we cannot help but identify with and root for Theodore and Samantha. Their chemistry, through Theodore’s earpiece, is palpable.

Amy Adams, as Theodore’s longtime friend Amy, and Chris Pratt, as a goofy receptionist, inject some much-needed insight and comic relief in Theodore’s life, which is otherwise devoid of human interaction.

Coupled with an astute screenplay and the breath-taking cinematography, Jonze successfully portrays the nuances of a warped man-machine relationship in an antisocial society. Just as the premise starts to stretch thin, Jonze takes the attention away from schmaltzy passion and delves into troubling obstacles that threaten the very basis of the relationship.

Audiences may be put off by the sluggish pacing towards the end and the abrupt, albeit heart-stirring ending. Some scenes of intimacy may also be hard to sit through, given the awkward nature of the relationship and the sexually explicit dialogues that the couple engage in. But it is hard not to be enraptured by Jonze’s message – that our love for technology may one day supersede our longing for the warmth of human love, and that day may not be as far away as we think.