As I’ve stated before in many other reviews, one of my favorite things in a movie is a big swing. Something different or audacious or new. Considering how many movies I’ve seen in my life, it’s kind of remarkable when a film can give me something I’ve never seen before and upend my expectations of what I thought I was getting going in. Sometimes a big swing in a movie can really stick the landing and send you out of the theater wanting to tell everyone you know to go see what you’ve just watched. And then, sometimes, you get a movie like Love Me. 

We open hundreds of years in the future. The apocalypse has happened, all of humanity is gone. Ruins of a civilization and an internet-connected buoy floating in the ocean are all that remains. The buoy wakes up and connects to the internet and begins to interact with a passing satellite scanning the earth for any remaining life forms. And what we have here is basically a love story between two inanimate objects. 

Love Me is essentially a story about the necessity of connection. It wants to be this big, grand, sweeping meditation on what it means to be human, what it means to feel love and the overall meaning of life. And you’ve seen plenty of little Sundance darlings like this try to wrap their heads around these enormous, existential themes, and some have more success than others. Love Me feels like it had one interesting idea, maybe enough for a short film, but as a traditional three act feature length narrative, it runs out of steam very early on and never regains any of the energy necessary in keeping the viewer invested. 

This is the feature debut from Sam and Andy Zuchero, and it premiered at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, where it received a mixed response. It’s easy to admire what they were going for in this one, but the filmmaking duo gets so lost on their way to their point that they end up making the same point over and over again. You notice about 20 minutes into the movie that there are not enough ideas here to fill a feature length running time, and then the movie just keeps repeating itself for the rest. There are some interesting moments visually or from what the actors are giving us, but the film is never giving its actors what they are giving it.

We kind of have three sections of story here. The first is when the floating buoy and satellite make contact. Then, the buoy scans the history of the Internet looking to learn about the concept of humanity, settling on an insufferable influencer couple (Stewart and Yeun) to model their personalities after. And then we get animated versions of these two characters, and then Stewart and Yeun play the final versions of these characters in the third act. And honestly these characters’ evolving sentience doesn’t really hit emotionally or mean as much as it could because you don’t feel like either of them are really understanding anything more profound about the nature of humanity or the meaning of life on any kind of deeper level. Like I said, we’re basically repeating ourselves for much of this runtime.

I applaud Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun for taking on this kind of out there, strange, bizarro project. I’m wondering what drew them to the screenplay and if this works better on the page. But their performances feel restrained and limited. And considering we spend the whole movie with them (they are the only two credited cast members), you want to have some kind of connection to these people, these ideas, these concepts, by the time we reach the conclusion. And I just never, not even once, ever cared. And then the idea the film leaves you with is a bit nihilistic and doesn’t feel of a piece with every other heavy handed message jammed down our throats for the preceding 90 minutes – a reminder that the universe is vast and infinite and nothing we do or experience really matters and even our connection to each other might be perceived as meaningless. Oh, what a fun night at the movies!

I admire the big swing in the Zuchero’s Love Me more than I admire anything in the movie itself. This is a big swing and a miss. This might have made a great short film, but as a concept stretched well beyond its limits in a short 90 minute running time that feels much longer, this ultimately feels like quite the punishing experience. I think there’s something interesting here at the root level about these filmmakers’ visions, and I will be interested to see what they make next, if anything, but their first impression is not a positive one. Love Me is the opposite of intellectually stimulating cinema. It’s inventive, but tedious. It’s ambitious but exhausting. I was intermittently baffled and bored, and I could not wait for it to end.