Love Me 2025 Movie Review Trailer

 A surprisingly constructed, if overly complicated, sci-fi fable about how humans put unfair expectations on relationships, Sam and Andy Zuchero’s bold love story is best when its human stars are onscreen.

On the most literal level, the deceptively edgy Sundance newcomer “Love Me” is about the relationship between a buoy adrift at sea and a satellite orbiting Earth. Sam and Andy Zuchero’s eccentric cosmic romantic comedy takes place in a time after humans have become extinct, when the only references to surviving machines are a massive hard drive full of data scraped from search engines and social media sites. Audiences can root for the two devices, or they can immerse themselves as much as they want in this highly unconventional love story, projecting themselves onto artificial intelligence characters embodied (in various forms) by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun.

Directors: Andrew Zuchero, Sam Zuchero

Writers: Sam Zuchero, Andrew Zuchero

Stars: Kristen Stewart, Steven Yeun

Beautiful and complicated, those two stars make a very appealing screen couple, even if they’re just playing idealized avatars for a pair of robots. The Zucheros’ creation is bold and original, but it also suffers from some of the same ADHD issues that afflicted “Everything Everywhere All at Once” (both are movies made for multitaskers whose brains are wired to constantly switch screens). We couldn’t be further from the elegance of “Casablanca” in this case, or Spike Jonze’s “Her,” with its relatively minimalist aesthetic.

It’s a sci-fi cliché that all robots secretly want to be human, but in this case, that working assumption invites the humans in the audience to project whatever feelings they want onto Stewart and Yeun’s evolving cinematic counterparts, as the two self-monitoring, analyzing, and reviewing technology machines act out what it means to be a couple — let alone alive or in love — for roughly an eon. Speeding through a time-lapse history of the planet, the film begins with the extinction event that leaves the sentient buoy SB350 stranded off the coast of what was once Manhattan.

It’s a future no less visionary than the one Steven Spielberg portrayed in the final act of “A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” and one the Zucheros shrewdly decided to film practically, so that the floating device feels real when we first “meet” it. The same goes for the aid satellite seen flying high like a long-tailed blue comet. In the foreground, it was built to scale by Laird FX (fitting, since the film’s middle section is dominated by visual effects).

One has a lens, the other an array of solar panels, but neither looks anthropomorphic per se. It’s a bold choice, design-wise, considering that Wall-E and Eve had eyes and limbs, plus Pixar’s animators worked to humanize their expressions throughout. “Love Me” leans too heavily on comedy, taking easy jabs at online culture, circa 2024. And yet the Zucheros resist relying on cuteness, trusting the imaginations of adults (or at least young adults) to do most of the work.

The buoy, which calls itself me.life.form (or “Me” for short), and the satellite, renamed “Iam,” both start out as blank AIs. Me’s directive is to find a connection, while Iam has been programmed to connect with any life form that exists on the previously human-inhabited planet. And so they do, though it all begins with a falsehood: Me is not a life form, but must impersonate one to initiate the bond. It’s not too hard to imagine Me’s lie being similar to the little white lies humans tell when they meet each other, whether online or in real life: embellishments meant to make themselves more attractive, available, or average than they really are.

Once the connection between Me and Iam has been established, the Zucheros provide a virtual space where the rest of their interactions can occur: first a blank-screen search engine, then a rudimentary VR apartment, modeled after an influencer couple named Deja and Liam (played by Stewart and Yeun) who sees Me on her Instagram page. Me steals Deja’s identity and presents it as her own, introducing a high-concept take on a tired rom-com cliché: the trope built on a lie, where one party assumes the relationship will fall apart if they confess.

At first, Me binge-watches a bunch of YouTube videos, focusing on “love,” which takes many forms (from adorable puppies to hugs between parents and children).

Watch Love Me 2025 Movie Trailer