Her: A Brilliant, Bizarre, and Slightly Terrifying Romance for the Age of Loneliness
There are films that entertain you, films that impress you, and films that quietly stroll up behind you, hit you over the head with a hammer, and then ask whether you have been emotionally available lately. Her is very much in the third category. On the surface, this is a science fiction love story about a man who falls in love with his operating system. Which, if you say it quickly, sounds like the sort of premise dreamed up by someone who has spent too long in a room full of scented candles and technical jargon. But the extraordinary thing about Her is that it never feels silly for a second. It feels sad, tender, intelligent, and, worst of all, completely plausible. That is the real trick of the film. It begins with an idea that sounds absurd and then quietly proves that the absurdity is only there because the rest of us are pretending not to notice what modern life is doing to us. We have all become increasingly dependent on machines to organize our lives, filter our relationships, ...