![]() ![]() (Her academic specialty is Sumerian cuneiform, and she’s on the verge of a major breakthrough.) Tom, his eyes shiny with programmed wisdom-it’s an “I know yourself better than you know yourself” look if ever there were one-informs her that “93 percent of German women dream of this.” She bursts his robot bubble, to the degree that’s possible, by stating flatly that she’s part of the other 7 percent. Alma, so cerebral and skeptical she’s practically made those qualities her religion, balks. Later, because his robot brain is convinced she works too hard, he draws a rose-petal-strewn bath for her, holding a champagne flute aloft like a knowledge-engineered bon vivant. He’s wearing a James Bond bathrobe, and he’s made some pancakes for breakfast. Tom has helpfully arranged the books on her shelves by color, exactly the way she doesn’t want them. The next morning-Tom doesn’t need to sleep, though he pretends to-Alma awakens to a fully tidied apartment. ![]() After he’s repaired, she escorts him, with his single bachelor’s rolling suitcase in hand, to her flat, a mess of books and papers and other detritus of academic life. ![]() It doesn’t help that Tom malfunctions on the dance floor of the club where they’ve just met. The two will live together for three weeks, after which she’ll deliver her assessment: Are these robots sophisticated enough to become citizens of the real world-to get passports and drivers’ licenses, like everyday people-but also, perhaps more important, can they make suitable romantic companions for perennially single people?Īlma’s robot, Tom (Dan Stevens), is supposedly exactly her type-he loves Rilke, though who doesn’t?-yet she resists his charms from the minute she’s introduced to him by the manufacturer’s rep (played, with metallic terseness, by the wonderful German actor Sandra Hüller). She has agreed to test-drive a humanoid robot designed to her exact specifications. Alma (Maren Eggert, who won a Silver Bear at the Berlin Film Festival for this performance) is a Berlin academic who has reluctantly accepted an assignment no one else will take, because everyone else in her orbit is happily paired off. It would be easy to make a terrible movie from that idea, but Schrader has made a marvelous one. ![]()
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