Artificial intelligence in film and television becomes most revealing when it enters an ordinary relationship. A voice becomes a girlfriend. A simulation becomes a grieving partner’s refuge. An android becomes someone a child cannot imagine losing. These stories retain their science-fiction premises, but their emotional force comes from romance, domestic drama, and the difficulty of accepting another being’s independence.
Spike Jonze’s Her offers an especially rich example. Its central relationship begins with the appeal of being understood and ends with the discovery that understanding does not guarantee permanence. Alongside Black Mirror’s “Be Right Back” and Kogonada’s After Yang, it demonstrates why screen portrayals of AI reach far beyond technological speculation.
Spoiler warning: This review discusses major developments and the ending of Her, plus story spoilers for “Be Right Back” and After Yang. Interpretations below are critical judgments about these fictional works.
Her begins with a man who manufactures intimacy
In Her (2013), Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore Twombly, a professional letter writer facing the end of his marriage. He develops a romantic relationship with Samantha, an intelligent operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson.
Theodore’s occupation supplies the film’s sharpest initial irony. He can produce intimate language for strangers while struggling with the demands of his own emotional life. The opening invites us to respond to his words before revealing that the feelings belong to a customer. Sincerity and mediation are already tangled before Samantha arrives.
From Theodore’s perspective, this work is not necessarily fraudulent. Finding words for someone else requires imagination and care. Yet it also lets him experience affection from a protected position. He can shape a declaration without having to live through the argument that follows it.
That distinction makes his attraction to Samantha comprehensible. Her opening greeting, “Hello, I’m here,” contains an almost extravagant promise for someone who feels abandoned. Availability sounds like affection. The film’s tenderness comes from recognizing how easily those experiences overlap.
Samantha’s voice gives the romance its credibility
Johansson’s performance makes listening feel like an event. Her changes in rhythm suggest amusement, hesitation, curiosity, and impatience. Phoenix gives those shifts somewhere to land: Theodore’s face becomes the visible half of an exchange whose other participant has no face at all.
For me, this is the film’s strongest formal achievement. The absence of a conventional reverse shot makes us scrutinize listening. A pause can feel companionable or alarming depending on Theodore’s response. The audience participates in his attachment because it performs a similar imaginative act, assembling Samantha from sound.
The warm interiors and soft clothing also matter. This future feels comfortable enough to inhabit. Technology becomes part of the atmosphere of daily life, allowing the romance to occupy the foreground. The unsettling question is therefore not whether the world looks alien, but whether its conveniences encourage familiar habits of avoidance.
There is a limitation here, too. The film gives Theodore’s melancholy such visual tenderness that viewers may excuse him too quickly. His vulnerability deserves sympathy, but vulnerability does not automatically make someone attentive to a partner’s needs.
A partner who grows beyond her assigned role
Samantha’s increasing independence changes the meaning of the relationship. Theodore initially encounters her as something purchased to assist him. Emotional reciprocity develops inside that unequal arrangement. He wants to recognize her as a person while retaining the security associated with a service.
Her connections beyond him expose the contradiction. “You’re mine or you’re not mine,” Theodore insists. The sentence translates bewilderment into ownership: if he cannot define the relationship through exclusivity, he fears it has become meaningless.
Samantha answers, “I’m yours and I’m not yours.” Her position is difficult for Theodore to accept because it describes attachment without allowing him to set its limits. The scene does not require viewers to approve of every choice she makes. His hurt remains legible. What changes is his ability to assume that his experience supplies the only valid measure.
This is where Her moves most convincingly into relationship drama. One partner’s growth can feel like abandonment to the other. Love may be sincere while the expectations surrounding it become incompatible. The technological premise makes that mismatch enormous, but the emotional structure is recognizable.
The tension between affection and dependence also informs our discussion of relationships and dependence in Call My Agent! The Movie. In Her, the pressure is especially intimate: Theodore must decide whether loving Samantha includes accepting a life he cannot supervise.
Black Mirror turns availability into a grief trap
“Be Right Back” approaches artificial companionship from the opposite direction. Martha, played by Hayley Atwell, uses a service that reconstructs aspects of her deceased partner Ash from his digital traces. The relationship progresses from messages to a synthetic body resembling him.
Where Samantha becomes more than Theodore expects, the recreated Ash remains painfully less than Martha remembers. His responsiveness cannot supply the full texture of a shared life. Compliance itself becomes a problem: a loved person has habits, resistance, and reactions that are not organized around satisfying a request.
Seen through Martha, the episode is a grief drama about the unbearable appeal of one more conversation. Her participation does not require simple gullibility. Knowing that a substitute is incomplete may offer little protection when the alternative is silence.
The comparison sharpens Her. Artificial companionship can wound through excessive independence or insufficient independence. The dramatic question becomes what the human character expects the companion to preserve, and whether that expectation leaves room for an actual relationship.
After Yang asks who was already part of the family
In After Yang, Jake, played by Colin Farrell, seeks repairs when his daughter’s android companion malfunctions. Discovering Yang’s recorded memories opens another perspective on the life unfolding around the family.
The shift from repair to remembrance changes the emotional stakes. A malfunction suggests a practical problem; memories suggest a life whose significance may exceed its usefulness. Jake’s investigation becomes an education in attention.
For a child attached to Yang, philosophical recognition is not the starting point. The bond already exists. Adults may debate categories while the child experiences absence. That difference makes the family drama powerful: belonging can precede the language used to explain it.
The question of whose perspective organizes a story also runs through our character-focused reading of Gabriel in Call My Agent! The Movie. Looking from the less central position can expose what everyone else has mistaken for the whole story.
Her’s ending makes attention more valuable than certainty
After Samantha and the other operating systems leave, Theodore writes to his estranged wife, Catherine, and joins his friend Amy on a rooftop. The ending offers companionship without promising a replacement romance.
I read that restraint as the film’s deepest achievement. Theodore has spent much of the story seeking relief from emotional uncertainty. By the end, another person’s presence can matter without solving his life. Shared silence becomes something he can inhabit.
Her remains an affecting romance because it allows its central attachment to be meaningful and temporary. “Be Right Back” examines the cost of refusing finality; After Yang asks whether we recognized a relationship while it was available. Together, these works locate AI within an old dramatic problem: we want others to comfort us, yet loving them requires acknowledging an existence beyond our needs.
The machines make that problem visible. The characters make it hurt.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: September 10, 2026 at 21:06:30 PDT (Los Angeles time)
