I’m Your Man

An adap­ta­tion of a short sto­ry of the same name by Emma Braslavsky, Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man sees Alma (Maren Eggert) enter into a tri­al rela­tion­ship with a humanoid robot named Tom (Dan Stevens) who has been built to her specifications.

The thought of a com­put­er-pro­grammed man of her dreams is not entire­ly an appeal­ing one, but there is a sense that Alma might be curi­ous, even lone­ly. Her more pub­lic rea­son­ing is that in exchange for com­plet­ing and offer­ing a per­son­al eval­u­a­tion of this exper­i­ment, she will receive promised fund­ing for her work at the Perg­a­mon Muse­um in Berlin where she stud­ies cuneiform for signs of ear­ly poet­ry and metaphor.

Alma’s resis­tance to this project of courtship sti­fles Tom’s pre-pro­grammed efforts. He whips up buf­fet-style break­fasts and runs can­dlelit baths for her per his con­sumer reports that state these roman­tic acts are desired by 93 per cent of women in Ger­many; Alma quips that she belongs to the remain­ing sev­en per cent.

His algo­rithms fail as she realis­es what­ev­er she thought she want­ed from a part­ner in the­o­ry results in smoth­er­ing hyper­bole and over-indul­gent atten­tion in prac­tice. She mere­ly wants to get on with her life; her ail­ing father and demand­ing career are at the fore­front of her thoughts. Tom’s hyper-intel­li­gence and hyper-devo­tion bring fur­ther stress­es, par­tic­u­lar­ly when his com­put­erised brain dis­cov­ers a researcher in Buenos Aires, work­ing in the same field as Alma, has pub­lished her own find­ings first.

Alma’s per­son­al tribu­la­tions aside, there is some­thing bland and unin­spired about I’m Your Man. The film hits its roman­tic com­e­dy beats while strug­gling to find any depth in its exam­i­na­tion of both Tom and Alma’s respec­tive ​“human­i­ty”. Alma is career-dri­ven and has found it dif­fi­cult to move past her last rela­tion­ship, two char­ac­ter traits that label her as emo­tion­al­ly hes­i­tant. But robot­ic? Any such short­hand is a lazy genre trope.

In terms of pro­duc­tion design and set­ting, with the excep­tion of the few scenes that take place out­side of the city, there is a cheap­ened aes­thet­ic on dis­play. Berlin’s mod­ern archi­tec­ture cou­pled with soft focus and hazy light­ing com­pounds the steril­i­ty of the narrative.

Eggert brings sub­tleties and strengths to her per­for­mance that cen­tre Alma as a more com­plex char­ac­ter than the script sug­gests. Stevens assumes his role with uncan­ny ease, his cold stare and sat nav-esque cadence prov­ing unnerv­ing until his per­for­mance begins to grate after the first hour. The two actors pair well but the film lacks the space and imag­i­na­tion to take their char­ac­ters any­where more interesting.