Kristen Stewart's Sundance Sci-Fi Hit Turned Out to Be a Disappointing Flop With 45% on RT

While the world's major distributors are eyeing the 2025 Sundance lineup, the 2024 Sundance premieres are slowly coming to streaming services.

The sci-fi drama Love Me was one of the more anticipated films. The debut feature from husband-and-wife team Andy and Sam Zuchero had an interesting concept and two big stars in Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun.

What Is Love Me About?

The movie takes place in the year 2586. All of humanity has been wiped out by a nuclear explosion, leaving the Earth intact but completely empty. The smart buoy continues to float in the ocean, and a space satellite, once launched by NASA, flies in the sky.

Both are busy collecting data that no one will ever need. The satellite tries to find any form of life on the planet, but only encounters the buoy, which wants attention.

One day, the buoy decides to pretend to be a life form in order to talk to the satellite. In an effort to look as human as possible, the buoy creates a fake personality based on a popular blogger on social networks, and even tries to build a romantic relationship with the satellite.

Love Me Is a Curious Take on Relationship and AI

The film covers the main stages of a romantic relationship – from meeting, to idealization, to mutual disappointment, to acceptance of each other's true selves – with only one detail: none of the characters in the film are actually human.

Two intelligent machines create an imitation of a relationship in virtual reality, pretending to be a couple of social networking bloggers.

Like most people at the beginning of a relationship, the buoy and the satellite live by external standards, using modern norms of socialization as inspiration: world culture and popular YouTube videos.

The Process of Humanizing AI in Love Me Is Too Unconvincing

At the same time, the process of humanizing AI in the film is too fragmentary – through classic everyday scenes – and without much desire to get to the bottom of what is happening.

Both machines are in the so-called Pinocchio crisis: in an attempt to separate themselves from the systemic attitudes, the characters find themselves in a fearful existential crisis that destroys their false relationships and pushes them back into the arms of loneliness.

With the help of familiar situations and dialogues, Zuchero tries to play out the scenario of the so-called unhealthy relationship, but the viewer does not really manage to experience the emotions of the buoy and the companion – after all, nothing real is born between them.

There's No Chemistry Between the Two Main Characters

The plot device that worked perfectly in Pixar's WALL-E just doesn't work in Love Me. Perhaps because in the animated movie, the robots' interest was natural, not forced, and they got to know each other gradually – through the shared experience of walking around a post-apocalyptic Earth.

In Love Me, the buoy and the satellite speak memorized lines from the Internet until the very end. In their unsuccessful attempt to create a sense of love, there is hardly any emotion to be found.