I’m Your Man | Little White Lies

I’m Your Man

11 Aug 2021 / Released: 13 Aug 2021

Two people lying in long grass, their faces close together.
Two people lying in long grass, their faces close together.
3

Anticipation.

Dan Stevens flexing his German as a humanoid robot could be fun.

2

Enjoyment.

A sterile aesthetic and narrative predictability make this a tiring watch at times.

3

In Retrospect.

Strong performances and chemistry between the leads are memorable takeaways.

Maria Schrader’s slight­ly flat sci-fi romance sees Dan Stevens play a humanoid robot designed for love.

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.

You might like

Accessibility Settings

Text

Applies the Open Dyslexic font, designed to improve readability for individuals with dyslexia.

Applies a more readable font throughout the website, improving readability.

Underlines links throughout the website, making them easier to distinguish.

Adjusts the font size for improved readability.

Visuals

Reduces animations and disables autoplaying videos across the website, reducing distractions and improving focus.

Reduces the colour saturation throughout the website to create a more soothing visual experience.

Increases the contrast of elements on the website, making text and interface elements easier to distinguish.