I'm Your Man

I'm Your Man

Alma is a scientist at Berlin's famous Pergamon Museum. In order to obtain research funds for her studies, she accepts an offer to participate in an extraordinary experiment. For three weeks, she must live with a humanoid robot with artificial intelligence designed to allow it to morph into that of her ideal life partner. Enter Tom, a machine in human form, created to make her happy.

  • Released: 2021-07-01
  • Runtime: 105 minutes
  • Genre: Comedy, Romance
  • Stars: Maren Eggert, Dan Stevens, Sandra Hüller, Hans Löw, Annika Meier, Jürgen Tarrach, Wolfgang Hübsch, Henriette Richter-Röhl, Monika Oschek, Falilou Seck, Karolin Oesterling, Marlene Sophie Haagen, Victor Pape-Thies, Inga Busch, Amal Keller, Mignon Remé, Gabriel Munoz Munoz, Franz Schmidt, Christoph Glaubacker, Sebastian Schwarz, Annie Kathleen Trettin
  • Director: Maria Schrader
 Comments
  • name99-92-545389 - 16 October 2023
    Yet more proof that movies can't do philosophy
    On the plus side, OK, we have a movie where the robots don't immediately want to kill all people (or turn them in to batteries? Or something equally ludicrous).

    But that's about where it ends. This movie kept promising a serious investigation of what it might mean to have perfect lovebots, but in the end (as usual) it didn't deliver. I should have known - and switched off - at the point where we got that second cliche of the robot movie, the robot asking "What is love" (or in this case "What does it feel like to have an orgasm?").

    The Straussian reading of this movie is that it's basically "some women are pathologically incapable of being happy. And would rather condemn everyone around them to similar unhappiness than change a damn thing about themselves and their lives".

    That's a possible reading, but I think it's too kind. I think the obvious reading is the correct one: shallow movie made by a shallow mind incapable of seeing anything original beyond what you've already encountered in a thousand other works of fiction. Waste of time.
  • AlsExGal - 11 February 2023
    Finally a romantic comedy for the digital world...
    And a very advanced one at that, at least in the movie. In an undisclosed time frame, in cosmopolitan Berlin, artificial intelligence has evolved to the point that robots are indistinguishable from humans. A persnickety academic, Alma (Maren Eggert, in a frosty performance I found endearing) is asked to bring such a specimen home, and report back whether it is suitable for long term companionship, not just as a super efficient cook or housekeeper, but as a partner, a lover.

    Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey) plays the robot Tom, and his performance is a delightful blend of dry witticisms and self-deprecating humor, aware that humans expect a robotic concoction from a 1950s sci-fi movie, and having fun bursting the balloon, although Tom does experience a few glitches along the way. I'm Your Man aims higher than slapstick love machinations. It selectively doles out rom-com tropes, but also finds a poignancy while delicately posing the question of what it means to be human, and whether the artificial version might be as good or better than the real thing.

    It would make a good double bill with "Making Mr. Right".