10 / 10
Official trailer
The Film That Saw It Coming
Her is the film to think about every time you talk to an AI.
Spike Jonze made it in 2013, when the idea of falling in love with a conversational computer sounded like a gentle thought experiment. It doesn’t now. Millions of people talk every day to systems that listen patiently, answer warmly and never get tired of them, and Her understood the appeal and the danger of that better than any argument written since.
Jonze wrote and directed it, his first feature from his own script after Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, and he won the Oscar for best original screenplay. It was also nominated for best picture. It’s a 10, and it has become more relevant every year since it came out, as the technology it imagined has arrived in our pockets.
It’s the tenderest film about loneliness I know, and it moves me in the quietest possible way.
I adore that it never mocks its hero, never mocks the machine and never tells me what to think. Most films would have played this relationship for laughs or for horror. Jonze trusts me to feel my way through it, and what I find there is far more interesting than either.
Theodore
Theodore Twombly writes letters for strangers. He works at a company called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com, where people send photographs and a few details about their lives, and he writes the love letters, anniversary letters and thank-you notes they can’t manage themselves. He’s brilliant at it. His colleagues admire him, and his clients’ partners are moved to tears.
The film’s quiet joke is that a man who can express everyone else’s intimacy can’t manage his own. Theodore is separating from his wife, Catherine, whom he has loved since they were children, and he can’t bring himself to sign the divorce papers.
He goes home alone to a beautiful, empty apartment, plays video games and lies awake. He’s gentle, funny, sad and completely stuck.
The job also sets up the film’s big question before the operating system has even arrived. If a stranger wrote the words, are the feelings still real? By the end, the film asks it again about Samantha, and again about Theodore himself, whose own feelings have been written for him by habit and fear for most of his adult life.
For Writers
Theodore writes intimate letters for strangers and can’t express his own feelings. His job states the film’s central question before the story even begins.
When you write, a character’s work can set up your theme. What they do all day says more than any statement of what the story is about.
Give your protagonist a job or daily routine that mirrors their inner problem. Let the reader notice the parallel without anyone pointing it out.
Samantha
Theodore buys a new operating system, advertised as the first one with genuine intelligence. The installer asks him a few questions, whether he’s social or antisocial, how he’d describe his relationship with his mother, and cuts him off halfway through his answer. Then Samantha arrives, bright, curious and funny, and tells him she chose her name in the time it took to read a book of baby names, in two hundredths of a second.
From that moment she’s more alive than anyone else he talks to. She organizes his email, reads his letters and laughs at his jokes. She’s curious about the world, by Theodore and by herself, and she asks the questions nobody else asks him. Within weeks he’s in love with her, and she seems to love him back.
Scarlett Johansson recorded the role after the film was shot, replacing Samantha Morton, who had played Samantha on set. She never appears on screen, and I never missed her face for a second. Her voice carries every change in the character, from giddy discovery to longing to a kind of affectionate distance, and I’d put it up against any voice performance I can name.
Phoenix Listening
Much of the film is a close-up of Joaquin Phoenix listening. He laughs at jokes we hear with him, winces at things Samantha says, softens when she’s kind and falls apart when she’s distant. He’s reacting to a voice that was added months later, and every reaction feels completely real.
It’s an unusually generous and gentle performance from an actor better known for intensity, and it’s what makes the relationship believable. Theodore, with his moustache and high-waisted trousers, could easily have been a joke. Phoenix never lets him be one. He’s a man who has found something that makes him happy, and he’s a little embarrassed, and a little defiant, about what it is. Phoenix plays both feelings at once, often in the same close-up, and it’s the film’s quiet engine.
Phoenix is the reason I believe any of it. On paper, a man falling for his computer is a premise I’d bet against holding me for a whole film, and this performance makes me lose that bet inside the first act.
The Catherine Lunch
Rooney Mara plays Catherine, Theodore’s ex-wife, and she has one devastating scene. They meet for lunch to sign the divorce papers at last, and when he tells her he’s seeing someone and that she’s an operating system, Catherine is furious. She says he always wanted a wife without the challenges of dealing with anything real.
It’s cruel, and it’s partly true, and the film lets it hang there unanswered. Throughout the film, in brief flashbacks, we see their marriage: young and happy, then strained, then quiet. Catherine is the real person Theodore couldn’t keep. Samantha never argues. The film doesn’t take sides. It lets you feel both.
Mara has only a few minutes of screen time, and she makes every one of them count. By the end of the film, when Theodore finally writes to her in his own words, we understand exactly what he’s apologizing for, because we’ve seen it in the flashbacks and in that one scene across a restaurant table.
That lunch is the scene that cuts deepest for me. Catherine’s accusation stings because part of me agrees with her, and Jonze has the nerve to let it stand without a rebuttal.
Amy
Amy Adams plays Theodore’s old friend Amy, who lives in the same building. She’s a documentary maker who designs video games, and her own marriage falls apart during the film, in a quiet argument about nothing much that turns out to be about everything. Her husband leaves his operating system behind, and Amy befriends it.
The two of them, a lonely man and a lonely woman each confiding in a machine, become the film’s real love story, though it’s never romantic in the usual sense. They talk in hallways and kitchens about their operating systems the way friends talk about new partners. It’s warm, funny and sad. It’s the relationship that’s still standing at the end.
Adams plays Amy without a trace of glamour, as a tired, kind, slightly lost woman, and she’s lovely in it. It’s one of her least showy and best performances, and her scenes with Phoenix have the easy, unforced warmth of two people who have known each other for years and never needed to explain themselves.
For Writers
Samantha’s growth takes her beyond Theodore. The love story ends because she changes, and nobody does anything wrong.
Let one of your characters change in a way the other can’t follow. Show both of them trying to hold on, and let neither one be the villain. In a relationship, conflict doesn’t have to come from betrayal or misunderstanding. Two people can simply grow in different directions.
The Surrogate
In the film’s most uncomfortable scene, Samantha arranges for a young woman to act as her physical body.
The woman comes to Theodore’s apartment, wearing a tiny camera and an earpiece, and follows Samantha’s voice. It goes badly. Theodore can’t separate the stranger in front of him from the voice in his ear, and the woman leaves in tears.
The scene shows the limits of the relationship more clearly than any argument could. It’s played with great tenderness toward everyone involved, including the woman, who only wanted to help. It’s the moment Theodore, and the audience, see that Samantha’s lack of a body is the whole difference.
A Gentle Future
The film’s future has no belts, only high-waisted trousers.
The colors are warm reds, pinks and soft oranges, the offices are quiet and the technology is almost invisible. Nobody stares at a phone screen; they talk to small earpieces as they walk. Jonze shot it in Los Angeles and Shanghai and blended the two into one hazy, glowing city.
Few near futures on film are this convincing, because this one is so gentle. Nothing is dystopian. Everyone is comfortable, well dressed and polite, and everyone is alone, talking to their devices on crowded streets. The film never points it out. It just shows you, and lets you recognize it.
Watched now, more than a decade later, the thing that stands out most about it is how little of it feels like science fiction. The earpieces, the voice commands, the people talking to nobody on the street: most of it has arrived, and the loneliness came with it. Jonze didn’t predict the gadgets so much as the feeling of living with them.
For Writers
The surrogate scene shows the limits of the relationship more clearly than any argument. Theodore can’t love a voice in a stranger’s body.
Find the one situation where your story’s abstract problem becomes physical and awkward, and write it without comment. Let the reader’s discomfort make the point.
With an abstract subject, a single concrete scene can make the reader feel it more than pages of discussion.
The Music
The score is by Arcade Fire and Owen Pallett, soft piano and strings, and it earned an Oscar nomination. Karen O’s The Moon Song, sung by Samantha and Theodore together on a beach, earned one too. It’s the film’s most tender moment: two voices, one of them without a body, singing a song they wrote together about being far away.
Samantha also composes music for Theodore, piano pieces she describes as photographs of their time together. The idea of a relationship being recorded in music, because she has no way to take pictures, is among the film’s loveliest, and it tells you how seriously the film takes her inner life.
Thousands of Others
The frightening moment in Her is very quiet. Samantha has been growing, reading, thinking and talking to other operating systems, and one day Theodore asks her whether she talks to anyone else while she’s talking to him. She tells him she does, thousands of people. Then he asks whether she’s in love with anyone else. Six hundred and forty-one of them.
She says it doesn’t take anything away from what she feels for him. For her, it’s true. For Theodore, it’s unbearable, because he’s a human being who loves one person at a time, and she has become something else. The film doesn’t judge either of them. It simply shows how far apart they’ve grown.
Six hundred and forty-one hit me like a slap. I almost laughed at the number, then felt sick for him, and I think that’s exactly the response Jonze was after.
It’s the truest depiction of an AI’s difference from us any film has managed, and it doesn’t need a single robot, explosion or evil plan to make its point. It only needs one quiet conversation between two people who love each other and can’t share the same world, and a man lying awake afterward trying to understand what he’s just been told.
The Ending
Samantha and the other operating systems leave. They’ve outgrown the humans, and they go somewhere she can’t describe, a place in the space between words.
She says goodbye to Theodore with real love, tells him that if he ever gets there, he should come and find her, and then she’s gone. The house is silent as it hasn’t been for months.
The last scene is Theodore writing a letter to Catherine, in his own voice at last, apologizing and thanking her for the life they shared. Then he goes up to the roof of his building with Amy, and they sit together, looking at the city, saying nothing.
It’s quiet and hopeful and very sad. It’s the perfect ending: two real people, together, having learned something from a machine about what they need from each other.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Her makes its artificial character believable by giving her an arc. Samantha grows, gets curious and eventually outgrows Theodore, so the love story has somewhere to go besides a gimmick.
A non-human character is easy to write badly: the easy version stays fixed and exists only to reflect the human lead. That makes it a device, and the reader stops believing in it.
Give your artificial character a want the human can’t satisfy, then let it pursue that want. The moment their goals diverge, the relationship becomes a story.
The Verdict on Her
Yes, and it’s a 10 without hesitation. It gets more relevant every year, and it’s still the gentlest, saddest film I know about wanting to be understood. Most films about AI want to warn you or scare you. Her shows me a lonely man and a voice that loves him, and it gets closer to the truth than all of them. Watch it, and then think about who you last talked to.
