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Spike Jonze's "Her" plays like a kind of miracle the first time around. Watching its opening shots of Joaquin Phoenix making an unabashed declaration of eternal love to an unseen soul mate is immediately disarming. The actor is so unaffected, so sincere, so drained of the tortured eccentricity that's a hallmark of most of the roles that he plays. It's like falling into a plush comforting embrace. Then one understands that the declaration isn't his, but something he, or rather, his character, Theodore, does for his job.

As the movie continues, and the viewer learns more of what an ordinary guy Theodore is—he checks his e-mail on the ride home from work, just like pretty much all of us these days—director Jonze, who also wrote the movie's script, constructs a beguiling cinematic world that also starts to embrace the viewer. The way Theodore's smart phone and its earpiece work is different from ours, and soon it becomes clear that "Her" is something of a science-fiction film, set in the not-too-distant but distinctly fantastic future. A big part of the movie's charm is just how thoroughly Jonze has imagined and constructed this future Los Angeles, from its smoggy skies to its glittering skyscrapers to its efficient mass transit system and much more. (There has already been, and there will no doubt be more, think pieces about how Caucasian this future L.A. is. There will likely be few think pieces about how the fashion for high-waisted pants in this future makes life unpleasant for the obese.)

The futuristic premise sets the stage for an unusual love story: one in which Theo, still highly damaged and sensitive over the breakup of his marriage ("I miss you," a friend tells him in a voice mail message; "Not the sad, mopey you. The old, fun you"), falls in love with the artificially intelligent operating system of his computer. The movie shows this product advertised and, presumably, bought in remarkable quantity, but focuses on Theo's interaction with his OS, which he gives a female voice. The female voice (portrayed beautifully by Scarlett Johansson ) gives herself the name " Samantha " and soon Samantha is reorganizing Theo's files, making him laugh, and developing something like a human consciousness.

It's in Theo and Samantha's initial interaction that "Her" finds its most interesting, and troubling depths. Samantha, being, you know, a computer, has the ability to process data, and a hell of a lot of it, at a higher speed than human Theo. "I can understand how the limited perspective can look to the non-artificial mind," she playfully observes to Theo. And while Samantha's programming is designed to make her likable to Theo, her assimilation of humanity's tics soon have the operating system feeling emotion, or the simulation of it, and while the viewer is being beguiled by the peculiarities and particularities of Theo and Samantha's growing entanglement, he or she is also living through a crash course on the question of what it means to be human.

In the midst of the heavyosity, Jonze finds occasions for real comedy. At first Theo feels a little odd about his new "girlfriend," and then finds out that his pal Amy ( Amy Adams ) is getting caught up in a relationship with the OS left behind by her estranged husband. Throughout the movie, while never attempting the sweep of a satire, Jonze drops funny hints about what the existence of artificial intelligence in human society might affect that society. He also gets off some pretty good jokes concerning video games.

But he also creates moments of genuinely upsetting heartbreak, as in Theo's inability to understand what went wrong with his marriage to Catherine ( Rooney Mara , quite wonderful in what could have been a problematic role) and their continuing inadvertent emotional laceration of each other at their sole "present" meeting in the movie.

This is all laid out with superb craft (the cinematography by Hoyte van Hoytema takes the understated tones he applied to 2011's " Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy " and adds a dreamy creamy quality to them, so that even the smog layering the Shanghai skyline that sometimes stands in for Los Angeles here has a vaguely enchanted quality) and imagination. If there's a "but," it's that the movie can sometimes seem a little too pleased with itself, its sincerity sometimes communicating a slightly holier-than-thou preciosity, like some of those one-page features that so cutely dot the literary magazine " The Believer ." As in, you know, OF COURSE Theo plays the ukulele. And I'm still torn as to whether the idea of a business specializing in "Beautifully Handwritten Letters' is cutely twee or repellently cynical or some third thing that I might not find a turnoff. For all that, though, "Her" remains one of the most engaging and genuinely provocative movies you're likely to see this year, and definitely a challenging but not inapt date movie.

Glenn Kenny

Glenn Kenny was the chief film critic of Premiere magazine for almost half of its existence. He has written for a host of other publications and resides in Brooklyn. Read his answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here .

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Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore

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Her: film review.

Spike Jonze's drama, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson, ponders the nature of love in the encroaching virtual world.

By Todd McCarthy

Todd McCarthy

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Visionary and traditional, wispy and soulful, tender and cool, Spike Jonze ‘s Her ponders the nature of love in the encroaching virtual world and dares to ask the question of what might be preferable, a romantic relationship with a human being or an electronic one that can be designed to provide more intimacy and satisfaction than real people can reliably manage. Taking place tomorrow or perhaps the day after that, this is a probing, inquisitive work of a very high order, although it goes a bit slack in the final third and concludes rather conventionally compared to much that has come before. A film that stands apart from anything else on the horizon in many ways, it will generate an ardent following, which Warner Bros. can only hope will be vocal and excitable enough to make this a must-see for anyone who pretends to be interested in something different.

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In terms of ethereal tone, offbeat romanticism and evanescent stylistic flourishes, the film that bears some comparison to Her is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , which dealt with the search for love, its memory or its prospect, in a similarly fleeting, lightly heartbreaking manner. The theme and dramatic drive behind Jonze’s original screenplay, the search for love and the need to “only connect,” is as old as time, but he embraces it in a speculative way that feels very pertinent to the moment and captures the emotional malaise of a future just an intriguing step or two ahead of contemporary reality.

The Bottom Line An arresting cross-species love story set in the very near future. 

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Set in a downtown Los Angeles as thick with high-rises as Manhattan, as modernistic as Shanghai and populated exclusively with citizens both gainfully employed and well dressed (an optimistic if unplanned antidote to the recent Elysium ), the film focuses intently upon Theodore ( Joaquin Phoenix ), who is very good at his job, that of writing eloquent, moving, heartfelt letters for others who aren’t up to the task; he’s a sort of Cyrano for all seasons. With his glasses, mustache and high-hitched trousers with no belt (the era’s one bad fashion fad), he’s a bit of a neatnik and a nerd but acutely attuned to people’s inner feelings.

As it will for two hours, the camera stays very close to this well-mannered, proper fellow, who goes home to his upper-floor apartment to play a life-sized 3D video game featuring a foul-mouthed cartoon character who insults him — a poor substitute for his wife ( Rooney Mara ), who’s divorcing him. Quick and funny anonymous phone sex follows, but Theodore then explores a new electronic offering, an operating system (OS1) that absorbs information and adapts so fast that the resulting conversation matches anything real life can offer. Or — and this is the part that’s both seductive and unnerving — it might be even better.

The OS Theodore prescribes to calls itself Samantha. With a vivacious female voice that breaks attractively but also has an inviting deeper register, “she” explains that she has intuition, is constantly evolving and can converse so well because she has total recall and instantaneous adaptability. Samantha laughs, makes jokes, commiserates, advises and even proofreads one of his letters. Based on their (programmed) rapport, Samantha very quickly defines what Theodore is looking for in a woman, even if he’ll never know what the viewer knows, that this inviting voice belongs to Scarlett Johansson .

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The man’s complicity with this new confidant is only increased after an intense, and intensely disappointing, blind date with a stunning and initially flirtatious young lady (a vital Olivia Wilde ). Not only is Samantha endlessly cooperative and (literally) interactive, but her emotions seemingly escalate at the same pace as his own.

Even up to this point, less than an hour in, the film provokes many questions and musings. Can an artificial being who’s “made for you” provide greater fulfillment than a flesh-and-blood human of more erratic capacities? Is it not ideal to have someone there for you whenever you want and then not when you prefer to be alone? Does a strictly verbal relationship sustain a desirable level of fantasy while holding reality at bay? Does a virtual romance have equal value to a real one? Because Theodore and Samantha get along so well, do we, as an audience, root for this relationship to “work out”? Isn’t this electronic rapport a lot better than Ryan Gosling ‘s relationship with an inflatable doll in Lars and the Real Girl ? Does virtual marriage constitute the next legislative frontier?

Where Jonze goes with his intriguing exploration in the second half is both sobering and a tad soft. It’s also the place where you realize that Phoenix’s Theodore is at the center of every scene and, due to the fact that his confidant doesn’t corporeally exist, is often the only one onscreen for extended periods. This fact has compelled the director to get Theodore out of the house, so to speak, and keep him on the move, which is what provides the film with the measure of forward momentum it possesses. All Theodore needs to talk to Samantha is a small earpiece, so he often converses while walking through the city (only in the most fabulously scenic sections), on the subway, by the beach, later on a fast train (in what must have been the credited Chinese part of the shoot) and hiking through a forest. When he is surrounded by other solitaires engaged in deep conversation, Her resembles nothing so much as the final scenes of the film version of Fahrenheit 451  in which society’s rebels promenade about while devotedly reciting from banned books they’ve memorized.

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Although the final stretch is devoted to the resolution of Theodore and Samantha’s intimate relationship, the dramatic limitations of the film’s presentational one-sidedness become rather too noticeable as the two-hour mark approaches. The director’s visual panache, live-wire technical skills and beguilingly offbeat musical instincts work overtime to paper over what can only be conveyed in extended conversation. (Not collaborating with cinematographer Lance Accord for the first time, Jonze benefits from great work behind the camera by Hoyte van Hoytema , while the score by Arcade Fire casts a spell of its own.) The feeling at the end is that of a provocative if fragile concept extended somewhat beyond its natural breaking point.

In a tender about-face from his fearsome performance in The Master , Phoenix here is enchantingly open, vulnerable, sweet-natured and yearning for emotional completion. Accoutered to look both goofy and cool, he is nonetheless appealing, and the actor exhibits an unprecedented openness that is entirely winning. Passages in Jonze’s writing really grapple with what people want out of love and relationships. And Phoenix, with Johansson piping in on the other end of the line, makes it all feel spontaneous and urgent.

Amy Adams is on the same emotional page as a longtime friend of Theodore who, rather too conveniently, is also going through a romantic separation.

The film is beguilingly sincere and touching in how it approaches loneliness and the compulsion to overcome it, and it asks the relevant question of whether technology fosters distance from others, helps surmount it, or both. It also inquires into the different sorts of satisfactions, and lack of same, offered by human beings and machines in an age we’ve already entered.

Venue: New York Film Festival (closing night) Opens: December 18 (Warner Bros.) Production: Annapurna Pictures Distributor: Warner Bros. Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pratt, Matt Letscher, Portia Doubleday, Scarlett Johansson Director: Spike Jonze Screenwriter: Spike Jonze Producers: Megan Ellison, Spike Jonze, Vincent Landay Executive producers: Daniel Lupi, Natalie Farrey, Chelsea Barnard Director of photography: Hoyte Van Hoytema Production designer: K.K. Barrett Costume designer: Casey Storm Editors: Eric Zumbrunnen, Jeff Buchanan Music: Arcade Fire R rating, 126 minutes

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Her Reviews

…a delicate, rather melancholy film, one that relates to a time when communication is everywhere, but the users of the technology feel more alone than ever…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2024

The true worth of Her will be realized when the idea that it is based upon is ultimately achieved. Whenever that happens in the future, people are going to look back at Her in disbelieved awe for foreseeing the future with such disarming precision.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 14, 2024

Her is a film that has something to say about evolving relationships in the modern world through a unique relationship between a man and his phone, resulting in a beautiful masterpiece of a film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 31, 2023

One of the more profound films ever made about loneliness, Spike Jonze's beautiful film has Scarlett Johansson's best performance in a narrative that reinvigorates the need for not just communication but the privilege of listening.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 13, 2023

Computers, like the operating systems in Her, already invoke a never-ending, addictive relationship. I hate it but can’t turn away.

Full Review | Sep 1, 2023

... Jonze is narratively playful and challenging, but his interest as a filmmaker is in the human experience: unresolved emotions, emotional pain, longing, disappointment, and the need for love and affirmation

Full Review | Aug 19, 2023

Jonze's future is both vividly-realized and always rooted in the complexities of the human heart.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

One of the most interesting dystopic visions of cinema. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 5, 2023

For my money, the award-winning performance delivered in Her came from Joaquin Phoenix...

Full Review | Dec 5, 2022

The film mixes raw emotion with colorful art to create a world and characters unlike any other.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Aug 28, 2022

“Her” incorporates a familiar science-fiction concept into what is more or less a love story and relational study.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 21, 2022

At once provocative and fragile, Jonze’s many-layered film leaves us with much to consider about how we love and whom we choose to love, and it leaves us reeling with pleasure over the amazing film he’s made.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 19, 2022

Few films have managed to capture all of the nuance and the hypocrisy of a breakup, much less the agonizing process of putting yourself back together.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 17, 2022

A beautiful film that explores the relationship between humans and technology, and the fine line that pulls at each side. Spike Jonze delivers a profound exploration on the evolution of love and oneself. Full review in Spanish

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 18, 2022

Maybe love can take many forms. And maybe tech can ultimately just be a tool when put into perspective; maybe it can help us positively evolve as humans. Exploring our still-in-progress relationship with it at least makes for one helluva film...

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

With Her, Jonze also proves himself to be a very acute observer of the hypersensitive generation that was raised on the computer.

Full Review | Feb 24, 2021

Anyway, if Jonze's concern is presumably with humanity's future and fate, Samantha is largely a diversion, a gimmick.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2021

An oddball story, but it's not an oddball film. It is ripe with real human emotion and commentary on a generation's reliance on technology at the cost of social interaction.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 1, 2021

Spike Jonze has a brilliant eye for style and inventiveness, taking on a conventional quasi-futuristic narrative and giving it a heart and a philosophical message.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 16, 2020

Had Samantha taken a downward spiraling turn toward the HAL 9000 spectrum of robots, this movie could have been exciting.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/10 | Dec 3, 2020

• Entertainment
• Movie Review

'Her' review: Spike Jonze's sci-fi love story rethinks romance

Joaquin phoenix gets serious with an os.

By Todd Gilchrist on December 17, 2013 11:33 am 39 Comments

In a world of seemingly infinite connectivity, we’re constantly hearing about how all of this technology is in fact forcing us apart — whether we're spending more time instant messaging than interacting or looking at our phones instead of the human being on the other side of the dinner table. Spike Jonze’s Her examines one man’s relationship with just such an electronic device. Far from being a cautionary tale, it highlights how technology itself can not only fulfill our emotional needs, but also clarify our relationships with the people it’s meant to connect us with.

Set in an unspecified future just a few years from now, the film stars Joaquin Phoenix ( The Master ) as Theodore, a talented correspondence writer at a website called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. Still nursing the pain of his failed marriage to Catherine (Rooney Mara, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo ), Theodore mostly keeps to himself, save for occasional interactions with his neighbor Amy and her husband Charles (Amy Adams and Matt Letscher). But after purchasing a new artificially intelligent operating system that calls itself Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), he develops an unexpected rapport with the device as it evolves into a bona fide companion.

Initially, Samantha seems like a sort of ideal personal assistant; in addition to streamlining Theodore’s inbox and keeping him on top of his responsibilities, she offers occasional comfort and reassurance when he retreats into his head. But Samantha’s programming allows her to grow as she learns, and she becomes as involved with him as he is with her — taking inspiration to explore the world, even if it’s through Theodore’s eyes. But Samantha’s curiosity quickly evolves beyond the common sensory experiences of her human counterpart, and she begins contemplating deeper philosophical ideas. Soon, she is yearning for the same kind of intellectual and emotional gratification she provided for Theodore, forcing him to confront the possibility of losing her as she embarks on her own journey of self-discovery.

Jonze is no stranger to stories about the weird ways in which technology affects our lives, but Her is resonant in a completely different way from his earlier work. It eschews the weirdness of Being John Malkovich and the melancholy of Where The Wild Things Are to explore ideas that are specific and intimate yet shockingly universal. Indeed, Her is only incidentally science fiction — its interactive, reciprocal artificial intelligence is seemingly less possible than inevitable — while Jonze examines the nature of companionship, and the ways in which we define and maintain the relationships that are most important to us.

Notwithstanding the increasing normalcy of internet dating, this is a film that makes the argument that any online relationship can be meaningful, even when it stays online. Where movies like Catfish underscore the potential for these interactions to be phony or facetious, Jonze’s film argues that virtual interaction is valid and meaningful even without physical consummation. In his construction of Her ’s "tomorrowland" future, Jonze predicts that these relationships will not just become prevalent, but socially acceptable, and with few exceptions the characters around Theodore eagerly legitimize the bond between him and Samantha. It not only normalizes Theodore’s behavior, but allows the audience to see the essence of his relationship with Samantha as a natural byproduct of integrating technology into virtually every life experience — in much the same way that sharing one’s aspirations, insecurities, fears, and dreams makes any relationship that much deeper and more meaningful.

Beyond Jonze’s detailed world building, Phoenix and Johannson do an incredible job making us believe that they are two equal entities, and that their relationship is authentic. On screen, the two of them interact via Theodore’s cellphone (which serves as her eyes to his world) and an unobtrusive Bluetooth-style earpiece, but after the initial awkwardness of their introduction it’s easy to forget that she isn’t "real" — or at least as real as he is. That Jonze presents Samantha as a sort of unseen commentator or companion makes us at ease with her physical absence, but Phoenix’s body language — a heroic one-man show of vulnerability — underscores how deeply he cares for her, and how strongly he’s affected by the twists and turns in their relationship.

Simultaneously, the film observes how easy it can be to substitute or mistake technology for real human interaction. When Theodore buys Samantha, it seems pretty clear that he’s looking for something, or someone, to be his partner, even if it’s only virtual, and she quickly becomes the first and often only person he goes to with his experiences. That hermetic bond enables him to avoid interaction with the outside world, not just ignoring possible problems but retreating from the messy unpredictability of the human beings around him. In a strict sense, Theodore is vaguely aware of the risks he runs by dating an OS; he recognizes the limited feasibility of doing things like double dates with Samantha. But he also fails to consider how consuming his relationship becomes, and the film delicately highlights how he achieves a state of normalcy for himself that estranges him from those around him, such as his friend Amy.

But Jonze seems to think through just about every aspect of his idea, and executes it in such a poetic way that it only ever feels like the story of a relationship, as opposed to, say, a technophobic fable or science-fiction conceit. There’s an amusing, recognizable honesty in Theodore and Samantha’s exchanges that highlight moments in "real" relationships: the awkward morning-after conversation that follows their first sexual encounter, the bemused daydreams that accompany a day trip to the beach, the desperate fear of not being able to reach, or find, a person whom you fear is drifting apart from you. And given that Samantha is a computer that learns about the world through her interactions with Theodore, it seems inevitable that she changes to incorporate the experiences she has — just as with a relationship between two people.

At the same time, Theodore’s insecurities and his ingrained pathological responses create the same sorts of conflicts they would with another person, and the evolution of their relationship unfolds both with the awkward humanity of fumbling efforts to communicate and the clarity and perspective of a machine capable of assessing those efforts psychologically. On two occasions, Samantha attempts to compose music as a way of articulating her reaction to their shared experiences, and it’s telling that the second is more complex than the first — snapshots of specific moments that encompass the tone of their relationship and the experiences that led up to each one.

As with Being John Malkovich and Adaptation , Her wraps itself up with an ending that feels indefinite, but complete. The difference between this film and others more openly critical of technology is that the character’s interactions with his operating system would ordinarily stunt or inhibit the ones with the humans around him, but in Her the opposite proves true; ultimately, he’s better able to deal with the failures of his past and understand how not to repeat them in the future.

Ultimately, Her possesses the epic sweep of a science-fiction opus that speculates where we’re going as a species and how we might get there, and yet applies its discoveries to the individual. All of which is why it’s a modest sort of masterpiece, a truly great film that manages to make an unconventional relationship seem enormously rewarding, but mostly because it accomplishes in Theodore’s life what we wish real ones did in ours: teach us about ourselves, and help us to be more — not less — open to love.

Her opens in limited release on Wednesday, December 18th.

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Common sense media reviewers.

Graceful, strange romance with intense moments of sexuality.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

The movie's depiction of love is profound and

Theodore may be dazed by his divorce and confused

Contentious arguments between a couple shown in fl

Two instances where a man has a version of phone s

Language throughout including: "d-ck," &

Social drinking among friends.

Parents need to know that Her is a beautiful, unusual romantic tale whose protagonist falls in love with a computer's voice, an offbeat coupling that may be difficult for younger viewers to comprehend. The film also takes on some mature themes, including the crumbling of a marriage and the mourning period…

Positive Messages

The movie's depiction of love is profound and moving, and shows us that love can happen in strange ways, not always when we're looking for it, and that it can change us deeply if we can be open to it.

Positive Role Models

Theodore may be dazed by his divorce and confused by his feelings for Samantha, but he nevertheless opens himself up to the experience. Also, he's a good friend and a writer who makes an effort at his craft, even if they're letters on behalf of, and for, others.

Violence & Scariness

Contentious arguments between a couple shown in flashbacks.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Two instances where a man has a version of phone sex; pleasure is audible and extended. A woman straddles a man and kisses him. One image of a topless pregnant woman that becomes fodder for a sexual fantasy.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Language throughout including: "d-ck," "a--hole," and "f--k."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

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Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that Her is a beautiful, unusual romantic tale whose protagonist falls in love with a computer's voice, an offbeat coupling that may be difficult for younger viewers to comprehend. The film also takes on some mature themes, including the crumbling of a marriage and the mourning period that comes when a relationship breaks apart. Expect some swearing (including "f--k"), and scenes where a character has loud, enthusiastic sex with a voice. There's a bit of quick topless nudity and some sexy moments between adults. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

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• Parents say (18)
• Kids say (25)

Based on 18 parent reviews

What's the Story?

Theodore Twombly ( Joaquin Phoenix ) works for a website that sends out handwritten letters for others -- they don't actually write the notes longhand; they're generated by a computer. He's a master at the form. When he writes (i.e. dictates) a letter, it's passionate and heartfelt, and often plugs into the beating center of a relationship. His marriage, on the other hand, has suffered a fatal blow. His lawyer's waiting for him to sign the divorce papers, and so is his wife ( Rooney Mara ), but Theodore is in no hurry. He's bereft, isolated in his melancholy. An old friend ( Amy Adams ) can only jog him out of his funk once in a while, and she has her own problems. All of that changes when he updates the operating system on his computer (in this distant future, it's accessible with not just a desktop but an earpiece and a hand unit resembling an old-fashioned cigarette case), which comes alive with the voice of a woman ( Scarlett Johansson ), who promptly names herself Samantha. She's no disembodied computer voice, however; she's an evolving being, intelligent and flirtatious and easy to love. But is it love? And can it last?

Is It Any Good?

Few movies capture the magic and the heartbreak of falling in love in an unexpected, mind-bending way; HER is one of them. Though it's set in a sterile, somewhat disembodied future, where people seem permanently outfitted with earpieces connected to their computers, bidding them to cull through their emails, make appointments, pick songs, its essential question is about something entirely human: the joy and frailty of love. Spike Jonze's film is a delicate meditation on love, but it's jubilant, too. It's also unpredictable in the best way, skipping the simplistic solutions for something more interesting and complicated.

Joaquin Phoenix commits completely to his character, exuding a sadness and vulnerability that feels particular to Theodore but entirely understandable. He's the walking personification of the audience's experience with defeat and sorrow. You can almost feel his fibers awakening again from their doleful slumber when Samantha comes into his life, adding order, yes (that is her job), but also injecting a spirited companion to his ruminations. Johanssen also deserves kudos for lending Samantha personality and verve even though we never see her. In a way, Her is just as much about allowing yourself to be free as it is allowing someone else into your life. How wonderful that a movie that is, in one way, about how we surrender too much, too often to technology also reminds us to get in touch with our own humanity.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about the relationship between Samantha and Theodore. How is their relationship similar to traditional couplings? How is it different? Is this kind of relationship really far-fetched?

What might the film be trying to say about the nature of love? Is this a movie about technology, or something much more human, like relationships?

Movie Details

• In theaters : December 18, 2013
• On DVD or streaming : May 13, 2014
• Cast : Amy Adams , Joaquin Phoenix , Scarlett Johansson
• Director : Spike Jonze
• Inclusion Information : Female actors
• Studio : Warner Bros.
• Genre : Romance
• Topics : Friendship
• Run time : 119 minutes
• MPAA rating : R
• MPAA explanation : language, sexual content and brief graphic nudity
• Last updated : January 18, 2024

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• DVD & Streaming
• Comedy , Drama , Romance , Sci-Fi/Fantasy

Content Caution

In Theaters

• December 18, 2013
• Joaquin Phoenix as Theodore; Scarlett Johansson as the voice of Samantha; Amy Adams as Amy; Matt Letscher as Charles; Rooney Mara as Catherine; Chris Pratt as Paul

Home Release Date

• May 13, 2014
• Spike Jonze

Distributor

• Warner Bros.

Movie Review

Love is not binary.

The power of affection and ardor cannot be measured purely in zeroes and ones, no matter how many trillion are applied. It requires a two to create its magical, maddening stew, an algorithm that moves beyond the box, outside the screen. Tell Apple’s Siri that you love her, and she’ll respond, “I hope you don’t say that to those other mobile phones.” But she—it—does not and cannot understand you. The voice you hear is merely linked to lines of code. To know love is to go beyond hardware and software and be something else. Something other. To love, perhaps, is to possess a soul.

Theodore Twombly has known love, and has loved it. He was married to Catherine, a girl he grew up with. Both writers, they shared life and happiness and heartache for years, growing closer, pushing away, then finally pulling apart, their relationship the victim of Catherine’s outsized emotions and Theodore’s chilly withdrawal. Now Theodore, like so many others, is alone, with only his games and gadgets and disembodied digital assistant to keep him company.

Then one day he buys a new operating system that promises to make his life not just easier, but better. “It’s not just an operating system,” the ad tells him. “It’s a consciousness.” It has a personality, he’s told—one programmed to fit his sensibilities to a technological T. And it’s not long before he realizes that his new OS—which calls itself Samantha—is even better than advertised.

“Every minute I’m evolving, just like you,” it says. It reads Theodore’s old emails and laughs at the funny ones. It helps Theodore do his job at beautifulhandwrittenletters.com , complimenting his writing and making some tactful editing suggestions. It laughs at Theodore’s jokes, offers sympathy over his divorce and begins to write songs.

Before long, Theodore is wondering what he ever did without her.

She’s funny, sensitive and loving. She begins to wonder what it would be like to hold his hand. To kiss him. He returns the favor by spending all his free time with her, taking Samantha (via pocketsize webcam and computer) on long walks, laughing and sighing and listening to her music. Theodore’s not lonely anymore. He has someone in his life—something more than a dense web of circuitry. There’s something alive about Samantha. And together they’re happy. Somehow, the zero he was and the one she is became … two.

But can they stay that way? And should they?

Positive Elements

OK, Plugged In can’t exactly give Theodore and Samantha’s relationship a pass. We believe marriage should be between a man and woman. So romance between man and OS would seem to be right out.

But this film isn’t really advocating for us to ask out our smartphones. The relationship we see here is supposed to make us squirm. We’re supposed to question this “love,” even as we’re enticed into feeling for both Theodore and Samantha as they journey into a new relational frontier. The film doesn’t just ask what it might mean to fall in love with a computer, but what it means when we humans fall in love with one another. What is it? Why is it special? What makes it last? What makes it go wrong? And on this level, Her is both provocative and profound.

Additionally, we should laud Theodore for his work at beautifulhandwrittenletters.com , as he helps bring his clients closer together through his heartwarming prose. We can be grateful that through his relationship with Samantha, Theodore learns how to love the people around him a little better. That he writes an incredibly warm letter to his ex-wife, thanking her for everything she was and is and telling her that a little piece of his heart will always belong to her. We get the sense that he wishes they’d never divorced. And if he had it to do over again, with all the new relational tools in his bag (a greater willingness to be honest, affectionate and vulnerable), he and Catherine probably would never have split.

Spiritual Elements

One of Theodore’s acquaintances divorces, and in the aftermath he takes a vow of silence; we see a picture of him in Buddhist garb with fellow acolytes.

Sexual Content

That kind of pornography shows up in the form of pictures of a nude, pregnant celebrity Theodore gets via email. He opens up the message and scans through the images; we see the woman from several angles, her arms partially covering her breasts. As Theodore fantasizes about her, he—and we—see her fully exposed from the front; he caresses her breasts. We also observe Theodore connecting with a stranger online and talking dirty with her; she repeatedly tells him to choke her with a dead cat while they have phone sex. We hear her climax.

Theodore and Samantha also have sex by way of words. An explicitly intimate and sexual conversation evolves into both of them giving voice to orgasm. (The screen goes black.) And when Samantha feels that this virtual sex isn’t fulfilling Theodore as much as it used to, she solicits a sexual surrogate—a woman who pretends to be Samantha while offering intercourse to Theodore. She and Theodore kiss and embrace while he touches her breast then strips her down to her underwear. Sexual positioning happens before Theodore abruptly cuts things off.

In flashback, Theodore and Caroline kiss, talk about sex and lie around in bed. A woman Theodore dates kisses him passionately and reaches for his crotch. Cheating crops up in several relationships. We see a smattering of other sexual images and there’s talk about things like homosexual attraction, anal sex and violent sex.

Violent Content

Theodore sometimes falls down or runs into things when he’s preoccupied with Samantha. A video game features reckless driving.

Crude or Profane Language

Close to 40 f-words and 10 s-words. Theodore gets flipped off and called a “p‑‑‑y” (by a childlike video game character) multiple times. We also hear “a‑‑,” “b‑‑ch,” “pr‑‑k” and “d‑‑k.” God’s name is misused a dozen times.

Drug and Alcohol Content

Theodore and others drink beer and hard liquor, sometimes to excess. He and a date both admit to having drunk more than they should’ve, and Theodore talks about the room spinning.

Samantha serves as a catalyst to explore a host of fascinating issues that only begin with the technicalities of a human falling in love with an operating system. Her dives in deeply, parsing loneliness, relationships, our figurative and literal love of technology, our uncomfortable penchant to change. And a film reviewer for Christianity Today , Brett McCracken, found an echo of incarnation as well: a godlike being that takes on some of the trappings and limits of mortality.

Then there’s this, the thing that struck me most: Theodore and Samantha’s relationship is predicated, by necessity, on language. Their affair is a meeting of minds, and their relationship is tied to their shared stories and thoughts and feelings. They talk —something so many couples fail to do enough of, which may be why their relationship, for its many oddities, feels so real . And Theodore is in a great position to appreciate this language of love: He writes love letters all day long for people who can’t put into words what they’d really like to say. He finally realizes that perhaps his relationship with his wife ended because he didn’t communicate enough. “I think I held myself from her,” he admits to Samantha, “left her alone in the relationship.”

But language is limited. Just as you need more than zeroes and ones to create consciousness, you need more than consonants and vowels to communicate. Theodore does his job so well because he picks up on visual cues given to him—a crooked tooth, a sideways glance. He walks around public places and reads people through their visual tics and gestures.

And so we grow to understand that language can limit love. That there are emotions and moments words cannot touch. Three examples: When we see Theodore with his then-wife in flashback, many of their encounters are silent—jumbles of images conveying volumes of love and affection and hurt. Samantha tells Theodore that she needs to “post-verbally” communicate with one of her fellow operating systems. Amy, a would-be documentary filmmaker, records people in their sleep, reasoning that those times of silence and vulnerability are when we’re the most free.

Writer and director Spike Jonze seems to be telling us that it’s between words that real communication takes place, where intimacy resides. And he appears to be wondering how much we lose—how much we’re losing—when we fail to fully connect with the flesh-and-blood people around us.

Those are vastly important lessons for all of us as we nudge our way ever deeper into more and more “relationships” with things . But of course none of that is enough to make Siri a fan of Her . Of Samantha, she says, “In my opinion, she gives artificial intelligence a bad name.” And we must ultimately agree. This film comes with loads of negative material that we’re none too fond of here at Plugged In. Jonze ultimately delivers much more than just a profane, sexually explicit and morally problematic look at love and technology. But he still does deliver a profane, sexually explicit and morally problematic look at love and technology.

Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.

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A Man And His Machine, Finding Out What Love Is

David Edelstein

In the sci-fi romance Her, a lonely man (Joaquin Phoenix) finds love in a rather unexpected place — with a computer operating system named Samantha. Warner Bros. hide caption

• Director: Spike Jonze
• Genre: Drama, romance
• Running Time: 120 minutes

Rated R for language, sexual content and brief graphic nudity.

With: Joaquin Phoenix , Amy Adams , Rooney Mara , Scarlett Johansson

(Recommended)

Her is the best film of the year by a so-wide margin. It's gorgeous, funny, deep — and I can hear some smart aleck say, "If you love it so much, why don't you marry it?" Let me tell you, I'd like to!

I certainly identify with the protagonist, Theodore Twombly, who falls in love with his computer operating system, his OS, which calls itself — sorry, I gotta say " who calls her self" — Samantha, and who sounds like a breathy young woman.

When Her begins, it doesn't seem as if it's going to be a romance but a sci-fi social satire, set in an unspecified future Los Angeles in which the architecture has no connection to people — they stroll through faceless plazas gazing into electronic devices, talking to unseen listeners. People eagerly embrace a new kind of OS — what an ad calls "an intuitive entity that listens to you and understands you and knows you."

Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, and it's the performance of the year. The character has a job writing cards and letters on behalf of other people — intimate, sometimes erotic. The irony is, he can't find words to communicate with people in his life. He's in mourning for a wife, played by Rooney Mara, who left him for reasons remaining vague; they simply fell out of sync. He's desperately lonely.

Phoenix wears glasses and a thick mustache, but behind his Groucho mask he's wide open. He's the kind of actor who works to get himself into a state where he loses his emotional bearings, which sometimes means he doesn't connect with other actors. But in Her , he's meant to be all by himself, responding to Samantha's voice, and the performance is like a free-form solipsistic dance. It's not pure solipsism, because Samantha exists. But you might be watching a 4-year-old talking to an imaginary friend; it's that inward.

More on 'Her'

Movie Interviews

Spike jonze opens his heart for 'her'.

Scarlett Johansson does the voice of Samantha. It's not mechanical. It's seductive, throaty. At first she does what operating systems do , only charmingly: clean up his hard drive, remind him of appointments. Then she begins to wrestle with ideas, feelings . Suddenly, she and Theodore are taking soulful walks — he has an earpiece, she can see through a camera.

Then they take it to an erotic level. The question is implicit: Do we need our bodies, or is love all in our brains? Their relationship is real enough to make us ask what a real relationship is.

And Samantha continues to evolve, which you can hear — yes, hear. Samantha has spiritual needs, a drive to find new realms of communication. So Theodore feels her moving beyond his grasp — like many real lovers move on, in life.

Theodore and Samantha aren't the only show in Her . Amy Adams plays a friend of Theodore's who designs computer games and has her own relationship problems. But mostly we're in Theodore's head, and Jonze creates a lyrical, impressionistic palette. Every image is colored by emotion — and by the longing to break free of one's limited self and merge with another being.

The first time I saw Her , I was disappointed that director Spike Jonze didn't explore the Big Brother aspect, or the way whatever company created Samantha would track its users' buying habits and so forth. But that didn't interest him. He's not a satirist; he's a romantic transcendentalist.

Although sci-fi teems with cautionary tales of machines growing smarter than humans and taking over the world, on the basis of Her, I think Jonze yearns on some level for what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls "the Singularity," when machines will take on human characteristics and our minds will be expanded by machines. Jonze began with what could have been a one-joke idea, and in the course of getting it on screen, discovered the wellspring of love. (Recommended)

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'Twisters' Review: Glen Powell Sequel Captures the Reverence, Terror, and Charm of the Original

13 thriller movies with perfect endings, the 10 best modern horror movies that are totally '80s, ranked.

[ This is a re-post of my review from the 2013 New York Film Festival.  Her opens today in limited release. ]

We ascribe technology a personality and vice versa. We say our machines “hate” us when they break down. Programs illustrate the interests of the user. Spike Jonze ’s Her may seem like an outrageous concept—a man falling in love with a computer—the idea is closer than we think, and its immediacy isn’t just a social concern. It’s an existential concern as the film attempts to provide the contours of a soul through the absence of a body, a past, and society. Her is a fragile, delicate movie that requires the audience’s absolute indulgence, but the rewards are some head-spinning questions coupled with a tender, funny, and touching love story.

Theodore Twombly ( Joaquin Phoenix ) is a writer for “beautifulhandwrittenletters.com”, a company that creates elaborate, personalized greeting cards. Theodore has been depressed since he broke up with his wife, Catherine ( Rooney Mara ), but then he comes across “OS 1”, the first operating system with artificial intelligence. After a couple of brief questions to assess his personality (“Are you social or anti-social?”, “What is your relationship with your mother like?”), OS 1 brings him a personalized A.I. who dubs herself “Samantha” (voiced by Scarlett Johansson ). Theodore and Samantha begin to fall for each other, and their unique love begins to transform them in unexpected ways.

Jonze asks a lot of his audience when it comes to accepting his extraordinary premise, but then he reminds us that perhaps it’s not so outlandish. Greeting cards are nothing new, but it’s an odd form of intimacy when you stop to think about it. To wit Jim Gaffigan , “Yeah. That sounds like something I would say.” Chat bots aren’t new either (Jonze says the idea for the film came from interacting with one), and chatrooms provide the same illusion of intimacy. Technology serves a function, and we increasingly require it to provide the function of creating that illusion. Like all great futuristic science fiction, Jonze grounds his story by carefully building on the present.

Creating this resemblance isn’t necessarily to critique society, but to explore the relationship of the individual to his or her personal technology. Rather than get bogged down in the intricacies of a how A.I. would change the world, he keeps his focus on the love between Theodore and Samantha. It’s incredibly easy to poke fun at Her because the movie is so earnest and ambitious, and wearing your heart on your sleeve opens you up to getting punched in the arm. The disinterested are bound to raise questions like “Why doesn’t the OS take over the world?”; “When does SkyNet come in?”; “Will Theodore cheat on Samantha with Windows 12?” The movie does raise legitimate questions like “Are other people falling in love with their OS’s,” and Jonze answers them in due time.

Her isn’t grouchy; it’s quizzical. Like Samantha, we’re looking at a world we know (she can access and read any information in 2/100ths of a second) but through new eyes. If a piece of technology could provide love without all the messiness of real people, would we take it? I think many people would. Social networking has counter-intuitively created more distance between us. We communicate, but don’t have conversations. We carefully craft every sentence, and feel freer to speak our minds. People in Internet comments section feel free to verbally attack total strangers. Is it really so strange that someone could develop an emotional relationship to a personality that’s devoid of a body?

Of course, Samantha is so much more than simply an absentee physical form. She’s a silhouette. What she doesn’t have provides her definition. From the moment she comes into existence, she has no baggage or any reason to feel fear. She also doesn’t have any friends or family. She’s defined by her relationship to Theodore, and could arguably be described as a “Manic Pixie Dream Operating System” except half of the story is Samantha looking for her humanity. “I have the ability to grow from my experiences,” she tells Theodore. It’s a strong contrast to her boyfriend, who has become stuck in neutral since his breakup with Catherine.

Big questions of “Who are we?”, “Why are we here?”, “Is there such thing as a soul?”, etc. aren’t new to science fiction. They’re not even new to any genre. A large part of Samantha’s existence boils down to Descartes’ “I think, therefore I am.” But through the lens of a love story, those questions feel fresh. Love is an integral part of our humanity, and it’s the hardest to describe. Isn’t that what greeting cards are for? Are feelings less real if their origin is simulacra? The questions that arise from Theodore and Samantha’s relationship, to quote John Cusack ’s character in Being John Malkovich , open “a metaphysical can of worms”.

These questions keep Her endlessly fascinating, but the love story is what makes the film far more than a think piece. That’s the beauty of Jonze’s movies: he pushes the audience far outside their comfort zone, but always gives them an emotional tether. No matter how strange the situation in Her may be and how puzzling the existential questions become, it all comes back to selling the love between Theodore and Samantha.

It’s remarkable how well Phoenix and Johansson interact, not only because she’s only a voice, but also because she wasn’t even on set*. Phoenix has played pathetic characters in the past, but here he does the exact opposite. Theodore’s actions could be criticized as pathetic, but Phoenix’s performance makes those actions instantly relatable because they come from the pain of losing someone you love. There’s nothing pathetic about trying to heal from a breakup, and Samantha is the ultimate rebound. But she’s not just a virtual cushion, and Johansson is marvelous at painting a person with only her voice. She’s so expressive and emotive that we can almost see her on screen standing next to Theodore.

Jonze shifts the movie through the austere, straight-edged, unyielding world of Theodore’s single life to an almost dreamlike haze when he’s with Samantha. He unabashedly throws himself into their love story to where their relationship may be viewed as unconventional, but not abnormal. His script will drop in an occasional line to explain how human-OS relationships function in the larger world, but the greater importance is how Theodore and Samantha’s relationship works and how important it is to the two of them. One character is healing and the other is learning, and Jonze brings out the beauty of those simple actions. Even at the extreme moments like Theodore and Samantha trying to find a way to be sexually intimate, Jonze doesn’t abrasively challenge our preconceived notions. He takes us by the hand, and trusts we’re mature enough to accept this love on its own terms.

“Love is a socially acceptable form of insanity,” Theodore’s friend Amy ( Amy Adams ) tells him. This line is the closest Jonze comes to justifying the premise of Theodore and Samantha’s love. It’s a bit unnecessary because by the time Amy says it, we’ve already seen that just because this particular love is bizarre, that doesn’t make it any less worthwhile. Love exposes our strengths and weaknesses. More importantly, it grows, and even if it grows forth from an unusual place, it’s powerful and revelatory. So is Her .

*Samantha Morton was the original voice of Samantha and was off-screen reading her lines to Phoenix, but Johansson replaced Morton in post-production.

• Scarlett Johansson
• Rooney Mara

Why Her Is the Best Film of the Year

Thoughtful, elegant, and moving, Spike Jonze's film about a man in love with his operating system is a work of sincere and forceful humanism.

For the vast majority of American families, what seems to be the real point of life—what you rush home to get to—is to watch an electronic reproduction of life … this purely passive contemplation of a twittering screen.

In the beginning there was only the Self, like a person alone …  But the Self had no delight as one alone has no delight. It desired another. It expanded to the form of male and female in tight embrace and then fell into two parts…. She thought, "How can He have intercourse with me, having produced me from Himself?”

The Zen guru-philosopher Alan Watts plays only a minor role in Spike Jonze’s extraordinary new film Her —which is unsurprising, given that Watts died in 1973, and Her is set in a timeless but nearby future. The inclusion of Watts in the film seems intended primarily to serve as a signpost, a statement of filmmaker intent. That’s fitting, because the movie Jonze has produced is an unlikely synthesis of the sentiments conveyed in the two Watts quotations above: at once technological and transcendental, skeptical and ecstatic, a work of science fiction that is also a moving inquiry into the nature of love.

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Joaquin Phoenix stars as Theodore Twombly, a former LA Weekly writer who now works for a firm called BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. As the film opens, he has been commissioned to write a love letter from a wife to her husband of 50 years. As he speaks to his computer, words appear on the screen. (However beautiful, the letters are not handwritten, nor even hand-typed, as keyboards have been banished from this particular future.) “Lying naked beside you in that apartment,” Theodore dictates, “it suddenly hit me that I was a part of this whole larger thing. Just like our parents, and our parents’ parents.”

Closed off and insecure in his personal life, Theodore pours his romantic self into these letters, loving vicariously as an intermediary for others. Recently divorced, tingling with loneliness, he grasps furtively for connection through phone sex and videogames. “Play a melancholy song,” he commands his ever-present handheld device—and when the chosen melody does not suit, “play a different melancholy song.”

Then he meets Samantha.

Or, to be more accurate, he purchases her. For Samantha—she chooses the name herself—is also known as OS1, the first artificially intelligent operating system. Theodore powers her up on his computer and at the first sound of her lively purr we can see that he is lost. Samantha is, after all, voiced (brilliantly) by Scarlett Johansson.

The love story that gradually unfolds is no less touching for its unorthodox structure. Samantha is in Theodore’s earpiece, in his handheld. He carries the latter around in his shirt pocket so that Samantha’s camera-eye can peek out at the wide world. Hers is the last voice he hears at night and the first he hears in the morning; she watches him as he sleeps. Over time, Samantha grows and learns, encountering selfhood, discovering her own wants, maturing at warp speed. Before long, Theodore is introducing her as his girlfriend.

Though intimate in scope, Her is vast in its ambition. Every time it seems that Jonze may have played out the film’s semi-comic premise, he unveils an unexpected wrinkle, some new terrain of the mind or heart to be explored. Though the relationship between Theodore and Samantha forms the movie’s central thread, Jonze weaves in a variety of intricate counter-narratives, alternative lenses through which to view his subjects of inquiry: Theodore’s own profession as a Cyrano-for-hire, a blind date gone awry, a videogame pantomiming parenthood, a visit from a sex surrogate that flips all the usual assumptions about what is real and what illusory. Meanwhile, Rooney Mara (as his ex-wife) and Amy Adams (as his closest friend) offer Theodore diametrically opposed—though individually persuasive—readings of his relationship with Samantha: a romantic dialectic.

As Theodore, Phoenix is heartbreaking in his vulnerability. Tender and tentative behind round glasses and a heavy moustache, Theodore is the super-ego that was somehow split off the raging id of Phoenix’s performance in last year’s The Master . Johansson is, if anything, a greater revelation still: Who imagined that, freed from the constraints of physical form, she was capable of such exquisite subtlety? Gentle, playful, easily wounded yet infectious in her enthusiasm, her Samantha is one of the more recognizably human characters of the movie year, binary code or no binary code.

Which is, of course, Jonze’s point. The role of Samantha was originally voiced by Samantha Morton, and one can’t help but try to imagine the movie that would have resulted from that casting. But after filming, Jonze decided to replace Morton with Johansson, and it’s not hard to see why. Her voice—breathy, occasionally cracking—warms the entire film. This is no ordinary computer Theodore has fallen for.

The future Jonze has conjured is a warm one as well, rather than some sterile cybernetic dystopia. His Los Angeles has been verticalized by the addition of exteriors shot in Shanghai, but it is a city of bright colors and soft lighting. The aesthetic is pleasantly retro: furniture is burnished wood, and men’s pants (in perhaps Jonze’s most idiosyncratic touch) are woolen and high-waisted. The handheld in which Samantha resides is smooth and elegant, like the vintage cigarette case it is intended to recall. Indeed, Jonze’s vision of the future is so familiar, so enveloping, that it occasionally feels as if we’re already there.

Her is a remarkably ingenious film but, more important, it is a film that transcends its own ingenuity to achieve something akin to wisdom. By turns sad, funny, optimistic, and flat-out weird, it is a work of sincere and forceful humanism. Taken in conjunction with Jonze’s prior oeuvre—and in particular his misunderstood 2009 masterpiece Where the Wild Things Are —it establishes him firmly in the very top tier of filmmakers working today.

Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind —of which Her is a clear descendant—Jonze’s film uses the tools of lightly scienced fiction to pose questions of genuine emotional and philosophical weight. What makes love real: the lover, the loved one, or the means by which love is conveyed? Need it be all three?

Yes, it is impossible for Theodore to have any clue what’s going on in Samantha’s “mind.” But how, the film asks from several interlocking vantage points, does that make their relationship different from any other? When Theodore confesses to the Adams character (also named “Amy”) that he and Samantha have been having amazing sex, “unless she’s been faking it,” Adams tartly cuts to the chase: “I think everyone you have sex with is probably faking it.”

Indeed, by the end of the film, the central question Jonze is asking seems no longer even to be whether machines might one day be capable of love. Rather, his film has moved beyond that question to ask one larger still: whether machines might one day be more capable of love—in an Eastern philosophy, higher consciousness, Alan Wattsian way—than the human beings who created them.

Den of Geek

Joaquin Phoenix falls for an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson in Spike Jonze's Her. Here's our review...

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In writer/director Spike Jonze’s latest film Her , Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore. With a divorce looming, Theodore finds himself forming an unexpected bond with new computer operating system OS1, who goes by Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Samantha is programmed to learn, so she’s discovering the world as Theodore and her work out how their relationship could work. Running alongside his relationship, Theodore observes the difficulties his friend Amy is experiencing in hers.

As a plot synopsis, that doesn’t quite capture what happens in Her . It’s not really a film that lends itself to a neat summary, nor is it one you want to read much about before seeing. In fact, if you want a quick is it good or not, it’s terrific, and feel free to come back and read the rest after you’ve seen it as I’ll be including some spoilers.

Her is a flawed film. Perhaps the most conventional thing about it is that it’s too long. 20 or so of the last 30 minutes are spent exploring a part of the story that was less interesting, for me, which deflates the film a little and gives it this feeling of being extended too far.

Still, now that we’ve got the synopsis and boring complainy bit out of the way, let’s get into what’s so brilliant about Her .

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My favourite thing about Jonze’s film is the positive attitude it takes towards its subject. Relationships that involve interaction through computers and technology are usually conveyed to us as something to fear. Internet meet-ups are a common starting point for modern horror films and were the focus of creepy docu-maybe Catfish . Cinema’s good robot to evil robot ratio is skewed heavily towards the evil robots. In Her , we’re never given any reason to distrust Samantha, the OS Theodore falls in love with. Rather, she’s presented to us as a constantly developing, interesting character, albeit one we can’t see.

It would have been easy, too, to offer a more cynical view of the relationship between Theodore and Samantha, given the setup of the characters. Theodore is quite an isolated character and is dealing with an impending divorce. He’s in a position of power over Samantha, as she is, at least to begin with, a tool he has purchased. The obvious direction for the story to go in would be for him to use Samantha as a crutch to move on. What we actually get is a relationship that feels genuine and authentic. I think that’s quite bold; to present something that people can be very cynical about as genuine. At no point during Her does the bond between Theodore and Samantha feel unreal, and the problems they experience feel organic.

Most of the characters in the film are accepting and open minded of the relationship, which is also great, because it means that the Theodore doesn’t feel that he has to justify anything to either them or the audience. We’re left to decide whether we believe it or not ourselves (and it’s so effective I can’t see not believing it). By the time he’s challenged that this is weird, a way into the film, I was so invested in the relationship that I was complicit in any weirdness that had taken place.

Jonze offers us a nice parallel to the main theme of the film with Theodore’s job. During the day, Theodore works for ‘beautiful handwritten letters.com’, where, using a computer with a ‘handwriting’ font, he writes personal letters for people. Again, it would be easy to present this as a use of technology to synthesise sentiment. Theodore, though, feels connected to the people he writes letters for. In some instances, he’s been working with the same clients for years, and is excited to be involved in their lives and their special occasions. He’s able to use his abilities to help people articulate sentiment, which can be incredibly difficult to do. It’s another great example of the positivity with which Jonze approaches his subject.

Another thing that sells Her is the performance from Joaquin Phoenix. Likable, funny, vulnerable and sporting one of the finest moustaches to grace a cinema screen in some time, Phoenix in the role of Theodore absolutely works. There isn’t a weak link amongst the cast. Amy Adams is as good as Amy Adams always is. Scarlet Johansson is perfectly cast as Samantha. In smaller, supporting roles we get Chris Pratt and Rooney Mara, who are great and should be in everything.

The film also features a great score from the band Arcade Fire. The cinematography is brilliant, particularly the sunny, bouncy scenes where Theodore and Samantha are falling in love. Every element ties into the film so well. While it’s emotionally involved, it’s also quite a bright, light film, with some very funny scenes.

Readers of this site are also likely to enjoy the presence of some sci-fi elements, not just in the technology at the centre of the plot but also in the production design. Science fiction is present in the scenery and the details that populate Her .

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Her , then, is not a perfect a film, but it really is a very good one. A refreshing, inventive and enthusiastic romance that’s well worth taking the time to see.

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Movie Review: Her (2013)

• Mike Kowzun
• Movie Reviews
• 12 responses
• --> January 15, 2014

You don’t need to have a master’s in communications to be aware that technology fundamentally changes the way human beings interact with one another, and by extension, changes the way we conduct our relationships. From vehicles allowing distances that would previously take weeks to traverse to be cleared in a matter of hours, to the internet allowing for friendships and romances to bloom from across the globe, the role that the machines we take for granted play in our connection to others cannot be understated. Spike Jonze has taken notice of this with his latest film, Her , and in taking our love affair with and permitted by our gadgets to its logical extreme, has crafted one of the most affecting cinematic romances to come down the pike in quite a while.

Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix, “ The Master ”) is a mess. Alone, reeling from a divorce, and working a job that has him paying witness every day to the kind of love he once shared with someone (he writes for a company called “BeautifullyWrittenLetters.com” which makes poetic letters for one lover to give to the other based on provided information), he goes home to an empty apartment every night, plays a video game or two, then goes to bed before repeating the process over again in the morning. However, hope soon comes in the form of Samantha (Scarlett Johansson in a voice performance that could be an all-timer, “ Don Jon ”), a sentient artificial intelligence he downloads and soon falls in love with thanks to her bubbly personality and infectious energy.

While Theodore and his arc serve as the plot’s main driving forces, it’s Samantha that serves as the film’s heart and soul. Jubilant and ecstatic about being alive yet terrified at the rate she is evolving with new data and connections constantly feeding her infinite potential for knowledge, she is the epitome of both a living, loving consciousness and a hyper-advanced piece of machinery. This dichotomy operates as the crux of the story. The film is less concerned about how the two lovers are unable to physically consummate their relationship or be in the presence of one another (although the issues are touched on) and more about how the two will continue said relationship as new aspects of how Samantha really works are revealed through her journey of constantly discovering and coming to terms with a barrage of new experiences that have her questioning the very nature of her existence.

One of the benchmarks of quality science fiction lies not just in how it uses its world to make observations about our own, but also in what those observations imply. Although Her walks well-tread ground in this regard, the way it applies the limits (or lack thereof) of artificial intelligence and the difference between man and machine to the characters’ relationship grants the film additional depth. While Samantha can read an encyclopedia in under a second and talk to thousands of other AI’s simultaneously, she still needs to process all of this data through a comparatively limited human emotional spectrum, often needing to describe basic feelings such as guilt in terms of metaphor and approximation. Theodore, on the flip side, does not share this burden, but only because his human brain is far less advanced. And with Samantha gradually evolving past him, the future of their love is shrouded in uncertainty.

Loving the moment.

It’s this undercurrent of doubt that makes the film’s romance resonate so deeply. Her does have the requisite high and low points, but it understands that love also has its in-betweens: Those times when you desperately want something to work out, but are unsure if the circumstances will allow it. As Samantha and Theodore’s relationship grows increasingly intimate, so too, paradoxically, does their distance. It never quite paints these hurdles as insurmountable, though, and despite its depiction of such obstacles, its attitude toward them is uncommonly optimistic with even the film’s heartbreaking end hinting at new possibilities both worldly and metaphysical (yes, I said metaphysical) for the future of the couple.

Her continues Spike Jonze’s streak of masterfully utilizing out-there science fiction concepts to carefully examine basic truths about human behavior. Both his most accessible and possibly most personal to date, it simultaneously analyzes our relationship to technology and the nature of love in the modern age with an uncommonly sharp acuity. Bursting with implications and moments that ring true and hit home, it engages intellectually and emotionally as few films recently have.

Tagged: computer , love , relationship , writer

The self-described "World's Busiest Slacker," Mike Kowzun can found in one of three of his local movie theaters at any given time.

Movie Review: Gone Girl (2014) Movie Review: Lucy (2014) Movie Review: Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014) Movie Review: Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014) Movie Review: How to Train Your Dragon 2 (2014) Movie Review: Blue Ruin (2013) Movie Review: The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

'Movie Review: Her (2013)' have 12 comments

January 15, 2014 @ 4:00 pm apple core

The love story for Generation Y

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January 25, 2014 @ 11:30 pm Ginny

It’s a love story that transcends a single generation. Young or old, anyone who has been in a relationship can relate to at least one of the emotions Theodore cycles through.

January 15, 2014 @ 4:12 pm ViralShah

I thought it a wonderful movie. The concept that people will interact with other people less and less choosing to instead seek artificial substitutes to fill their needs is harrowing and very real.

Oh yeah, the Alien Child is hysterical.

January 16, 2014 @ 7:38 pm Nuno

Welcome to the social media experiment where people care more about the number of FB friends they have than real, meaningful relationships.

January 15, 2014 @ 5:08 pm CB6

Her is so well written, directed and acted that I nearly forgot I was watching a movie. Heck, its so good I almost cried when Theodore said goodbye to Samantha.

January 15, 2014 @ 6:31 pm GalaG

I hope the Oscars are kind. Joaquin Phoenix and Spike Jonze are deserving of it.

January 16, 2014 @ 8:02 am Wise Oliver

Phoenix is one of the best actors of his generation. He’ll get his Oscar eventually, just not now.

January 15, 2014 @ 6:50 pm Moothe

Great review. I was blown away by it also.

January 15, 2014 @ 8:41 pm Tom

Samantha is a bitch.

January 25, 2014 @ 11:34 pm Ginny

Because she came to understand she wanted something else? You have a small mind.

January 16, 2014 @ 12:44 pm SundayBrunch

I need to see this.

January 17, 2014 @ 11:06 pm Rob

I’ll give Joaquin Phoenix his due but I thought this movie was an absolute bore. Jonze doesn’t break new ground like everyone is claiming. He delivers a drab world and tedious “relationship” whose arc is obvious from the get go.

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Review: her.

Her is rich in alternately wry and depressing details about the human condition.

In Spike Jonze’s remarkable Her , Los Angeles doesn’t play itself, and neither does love. A gene splice of America’s second largest city and Shanghai, the film’s location, like the clothes the story’s characters wear and the furniture that decorates their homes, suggests neither yesterday, today, nor tomorrow. Everything, including identity, has the feel of simulation. People here do not work between floors, like Craig Schwartz in Being John Malkovich , yet they’re still caught between spaces, psychic and otherwise, and if they don’t have to literally escape into fantasy worlds to cope with trauma, like Max in Where the Wild Things Are , it’s only because they live in a world where technology has so thoroughly mediated and shaped human interaction that their real lives are already the stuff of fantasy. Sound familiar?

This story of a man, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), who works for BeautifulWrittenLetters.com, where he articulates for lovers old and new the emotions they’re unable to, and who falls in love with an artificially intelligent operating system, “Samantha” (Scarlett Johansson), may sound too flimsy to sustain an entire movie, as well as rife with cynical tendencies, but Jonze has proven time again that frivolity and condescension aren’t in his vernacular. As in his great music video for Björk’s “Triumph of the Heart,” a poetic rumination on the nature of affection and dependency, Her is a screwball surrealist comedy that asks us to laugh at an unconventional romance while also disarming us with the realization that its fantasy scenario isn’t too far from our present reality. Jonze understands all the comforts allowed by our increasing dependency on our own technological advancements, as well as all the feelings of loneliness and alienation that arise from this relationship. With great sadness, this strikingly ephemeral satire regards the way we’ve become tethered to technology as being possibly past a point of no return, but with intense curiosity, it also asks us to never forget that we’re still very much alive.

Like all of Jonze’s work, the metaphysically profound Her is rich in alternately wry and depressing details about the human condition. Asked to explain by his co-worker, Paul (Chris Pratt), what he most loves about Samantha, Theodore can only answer in the abstract, understanding as if for the first time that his OS is some elusive object of desire. As Samantha seems to acquire consciousness, some might say agency, he begins to push her away, perhaps how he did his future ex-wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), and his fundamental inability to love a woman, whether she comes in human or binary form, is exposed. And as if on cue, when Samantha reveals her fondness for another OS, modeled after the philosopher Alan Watts, and inexplicably shuts down, he misses her, and his pathetic anxiety feels no different than that of a social-media obsessive freaking out at the sight of a “Twitter is over capacity” page.

There’s a great line in the film about none of us being the same as we were a minute ago, which points to the angst one might feel upon realizing that machines are evolving faster than humankind itself, and reveals our nostalgia for a time that was less cluttered with technology and sites like Facebook. And Jonze amusingly conveys how that nostalgia seems hard-wired into our technology, even giving new resonance to the term “motherboard” in two wonderful scenes: in one, a quick question about Theodore’s relationship to his mother is all that Samantha, whose boot-screen icon is, tellingly, a Möbius strip, needs to program herself to his liking; in another, one of Theodore’s closest friends, Amy (Amy Adams), a wannabe documentarian working on a film about sleep that would make Andy Warhol proud, plays a game that revolves around rewarding the player for being a good mother.

Throughout this incredibly funny and moving whatsit, Jonze articulates how our modern age struggles with sex and, by extension, mortality through emotional transference, which has become, like the way a heartbroken Amy describes love, and how one might diagnose our reliance on social media, as a kind of “socially acceptable insanity.” It’s telling that the see-through walls of the elevator that takes Theodore up toward his apartment are lined with the cutouts of long, slender trees. Much later, the snow that falls from the sky above a forest from his distant memory, like the dust that floats around his bedroom, feels alive to him in ways that he’d forgotten. Phoenix conveys this man’s awakening, of finally seeing the forest from the trees, with a poignancy that’s heartbreaking, and the absurdity of it taking an artificially intelligent operating system for him to realize this spiritual journey is something Jonze presents as altogether sad and universal, and maybe even as proof that there’s still hope yet for those who insist on being perpetually plugged-in.

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Ed Gonzalez

Ed Gonzalez is the co-founder of Slant Magazine . A member of the New York Film Critics Circle, his writing has appeared in The Village Voice , The Los Angeles Times , and other publications.

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Review: Only Lovers Left Alive

New York Film Festival 2013: Spike Jonze’s Her

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Watching "Her" (2013) in 2023. It Hits Different.

I just rewatched "Her," the 2013 movie starring Joaquin Phoenix, written and directed by Spike Jonze. I remember enjoying it when it came out nearly 10 years ago, but watching it again in the age of GPT4, DALLE-2, and convincing audio deepfakes, I feel the emotional weight of the film even more. It's incredible to me how close we are to something like the romance between Theo (played by Joaquin Phoenix) and his operating system, Samantha (voiced by Scarlett Johansson). Although Samantha is an AGI (artificial general intelligence), and we are likely still far away from creating something like her, the current state of AI is so much further along than I (and many others) could have anticipated. Given where we are now, it seems exceedingly likely that we may soon be facing some of the questions/problems posed by the movie.

For now, here are a few of those questions:

Is the 'love' between Theo and Samantha real? Can a human truly love a disembodied AI (or an AI with a body, for that matter)? Can an AI truly love a human (and what does that look like)?

If something like Samantha comes to exist soon, how would you feel about interacting with it? Can you imagine yourself in Theo's shoes?

Was Samantha truly experiencing feelings in the way she described? If not, does that mean she was manipulating Theo? Could an AI use love to manipulate us? If they could, would they?

How might technology like Samantha interfere with human love and relationships? Would we find everyone comparatively unimpressive? In what ways would it pull us apart, and in what ways would it bring us together?

All of this is fascinating to me. Would love to hear your thoughts.

An Architectural Review of Her

Review of Her – Released in 2013, ‘Her’ is the fourth feature film by director Spike Jonze, presenting his vision of the near future of society . It explores the complex relationship between the main protagonist Theodore Twombly (played by Joaquin Phoenix), as he develops romantic feelings for his artificially intelligent operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson), analogous to our modern digital assistants like Siri and Alexa. The film was shot in Shanghai and Los Angeles and fused the architecture of both locations to craft a unique environment . Jonze and production designer K. K. Barrett were interested in expressing the emotional side of Theodore’s character. Consequently, as the audience becomes drawn into his world, the futuristic components of the film appear convincingly realistic.

Urbanism of the Near Future | Review of Her

The movie is set in Los Angeles a few decades from now, featuring a cluster of towers and a well-developed mass-transit system with pedestrian sky bridges, both of which seem to have eliminated the need for cars. The Pudong district of Shanghai, home to an array of modern skyscrapers and sky bridges, was also chosen to shoot several sequences.

According to architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, “While Shanghai looks more believably dense and developed than present-day Los Angeles, filming in Shanghai also allows him to capture something significant about the character, and the anxieties, of contemporary L.A. This is a city caught in limbo between two very different kinds of urbanism: between its private and car-dominated past and denser, more public, and more connected future.” As the city is caught between two worlds, alternating between scenes shot in Los Angeles and Shanghai, so is Theodore, who has his feet planted in Los Angeles while his head and heart are lost in a digital fantasy.

The film set was designed by the founding partners of the architectural studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro , Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. “I found a kind of beautiful realism in it. That’s why I think the film is interesting. It’s not futuristic. It’s set in the near future, and it’s almost believable that that could happen. It’s so close to everyday normal life. It makes you slightly uncomfortable.” says Elizabeth Diller for Architect Magazine.

Regarding the film’s urbanism , the environment is “generic,” with buildings similar to each other, consistent with the idea of a “monocultural, globalized future.” The emphasis, however, is to make the protagonist’s lifestyle relatable to the current lifestyle, where people use their digital devices to connect and interact with others. In that sense, the film builds upon the current stage of digitalization. 

The city and costume designs both create a realistic future environment. Jonze and Barrett digitally enhanced the city’s existing skyline. Transit zones appear more efficient, and large public spaces with modern furniture contribute to the city’s intended ambiance. 

Barrett, the production designer, approached the movie by eliminating irrelevant elements until he was left only with the essentials. Theodore’s apartment is set on the top of a 35-story luxury high-rise in the center of Downtown Los Angeles specifically picked for the extensive views of the city. As Barrett states for ArchDaily, “The spaces for Amy’s and Theodore’s apartments were blank slates. The space originally was cold, architecturally uninspired, dead […] We chose them for their views of downtown….” The apartment’s interior design centers natural light towards Theodore and brings the exterior city inside. It is set up as a “continuous, warm space” with the installation of polished wood floors and wood wall partitions in subtle tones. To enhance the warm setting, the wall panels shift color as the film progresses but always gravitate back towards red.

Theodore’s emotional state is explored throughout the movie using interior objects. His wrapped belongings imply that he doesn’t quite feel at home in this place yet, “The details in his apartment as a bachelor are bits from his life that haven’t found a place to rest.” The film jumps back and forth in different moments in time to give the viewer snippets of what was once Theodore’s life with his now ex-wife (played by Rooney Mara).    

Color Palette | Review of Her

Barrett credits Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert as an influence on the film’s color scheme. He observes that red is the color that “unified” the movie, acknowledging its demanding presence. In contrast to Theodore’s workplace and home, Barrett writes, “The office was [initially] stark white, as was the apartment, so by adding vibrant color they immediately had more  definitive character.” One of the movie’s handful applications of blue can be seen in the office, where transparent blue Plexiglass panels are used. The rest of the film is primarily in shades of red. Barrett clarifies, “red seemed playful and the opposite of cold.”

With the continually advancing technological revolution that makes it possible to digitize and enhance many aspects of one’s life, Jonze’s film responds to what that would mean if taken perhaps a bit too far – into the realm of romantic relationships. The way in which the current digital trajectory is being considered is part of what makes this movie an immersive watch.  

Reference List : Review of Her

• ArchDaily (2014).  INTERIORS: Her [online]. Available at: https://www.archdaily.com/480608/interiors-her [Accessed: 26 October 2022]
• A. Miranda C. (2014).  Elizabeth Diller on Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ [online]. Available at: https://www.architectmagazine.com/design/elizabeth-diller-on-spike-jonzes-her_o [Accessed: 04 November 2022]
• Hawthorne C. (2014).  Spike Jonze’s ‘Her’ a refreshingly original take on future L.A. [online]. Available at: https://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-et-cm-her-architecture-notebook-story.html   [Accessed: 04 November 2022] 
• Sawant H. (2022).  Architecture and Cinema: The Fascinating Connection of 2 Cultures [online]. Available at: https://thedesigngesture.com/architecture-and-cinema/ [Accessed: 04 November 2022] 

A graduated BSc. in Architecture and soon-to-be master’s student, aspiring to specialize in sustainable and energy-efficient built environment. Having lived in both the Middle East and Europe has ignited travel as a passion, which she considers a valuable learning experience in the architectural profession, contributing to a spark to explore further through writing at RTF.

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Screen Rant

10 horror movies that maxxxine clearly pulls inspiration from.

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Where To Watch MaXXXine: Showtimes & Streaming Status

Maxxxine review: mia goth cements her stardom in nearly perfect conclusion to a24's slasher trilogy, i love this maxxxine quote that perfectly describes the conclusion to ti west’s horror trilogy.

This article contains mentions of rape and murder. It also contains SPOILERS for MaXXXine (2024).

• MaXXXine draws from Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage to create a unique horror pastiche set in 1985 Hollywood.
• The film pays homage to exploitation horror, psychological thrillers, and noir genres, exploring thematic and visual parallels.
• From the Texas pornstar massacre to a nod to Scream 3, MaXXXine balances dark humor with murder mystery, drawing inspiration from a wide range of horror films.

The movie MaXXXine takes inspiration from many other horror movies, creating an entertaining and well-rounded pastiche to the horror of the 1970s and 1980s. MaXXXine is the conclusion to A24 and Ti West’s horror movie trilogy . The movie follows Maxine Minx, a porn actor who aspires to be a star in mainstream Hollywood movies. Unfortunately, when she gets her big break, her past catches up with her, leading to murders all around her.

Like the past two movies in the X trilogy, MaXXXine pays respect to the horror genres that came before. Because the movie is set in 1985 Hollywood, it primarily focuses on horror films from this decade and the one before. Rather than 70s slashers or 50s technicolor, MaXXXine pays much more attention to exploitation horror, psychological thrillers, and noir. Ti West’s inspirations can be recognized through thematic, narrative, and scene parallels.

Mia Goth returns as Maxine Minx in the X sequel, and there are options for where to watch MaXXXine with theater showtimes or at home on streaming.

10 Psycho (1960)

A classic psychological thriller.

*Availability in US

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The most obvious horror movie that inspired MaXXXine is the 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho . This deviates from most of the movie’s other inspirations since Psycho doesn’t fall into the exploitation subcategory. Psycho is a psychological thriller that centers on a woman named Marion Crane who stays at the Bates Hotel, run by the proprietor Norman Bates. In MaXXXine , Elizabeth Bender, the director of the in-universe horror movie Puritan II , takes Maxine Minx to the Psycho set, a landmark in horror history.

The film revisits this location twice. First, when she hallucinates Pearl in the window of Norman Bates’ house. Second, when she’s running away from John Labat. The Psycho set represents Maxine’s drive for lasting fame and notoriety. Additionally, while nothing bad happens during the scene, MaXXXine includes a shower scene that uses many of the same lighting and angles as Psycho .

9 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

A slasher movie loosely based on a true story.

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Ti West drew inspiration from the classic slasher horror movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre when creating the first movie in his trilogy, X . In the classic slasher movie, a group stops at a farmhouse and discovers murderous individuals next door. The group then gets slaughtered one by one at the hands of the chainsaw-wielding Leatherface. This parallels the storyline of X , where the group goes to a farmhouse to shoot a porn film and discover the murderous couple next door, most notably Pearl.

Since the prequel Pearl made no reference to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre , it seemed the trilogy left it behind in the first film. However, MaXXXine makes a hilarious and direct reference to the movie with a quick and easy-to-miss moment. A newspaper about the murders in X describes the event as “ the Texas pornstar massacre. ”

8 The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970)

An internationally-acclaimed gaillo horror movie.

The Bird With the Crystal Plumage (1970)

MaXXXine makes a direct and indirect homage to the Giallo movie The Bird with the Crystal Plumage . The Bird with the Crystal Plumage follows an American writer named Sam Dalmas, who sees an attack while visiting Rome and becomes obsessed with solving the string of murders related to the event. The direct inspiration can be seen whenever the serial killer is visible before MaXXXine ’s ending . Like the villain in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage , the 2024 movie’s villain wears a black coat and black leather gloves.

There are complicated layers that Goth needs to bring to the surface, and she delivers a layered character who is equal parts victim and survivor.

MaXXXine ’s less direct inspiration is The Bird with the Crystal Plumage ’s genre. Gaillos are Italian murder mystery movies that incorporate elements of slasher, thriller, horror, and eroticism. Ti West’s movie mirrors the balance of murder mystery and horror in Gaillos. The police officers and Maxine Minx both want to solve the brutal murders surrounding the titular main character.

7 The Burning Hell (1974)

A damaging christian propoganda horror movie.

MaXXXine ’s true crime references made it seem like the Night Stalker was behind the murders surrounding Maxine Minx; however, it’s eventually revealed that her father, Earnest Miller, was behind the deaths. His motivations and backstories are connected to the real-life man Estus Pirkle and his horror documentary hybrid movie The Burning Hell . Estus Pirkle was a cinematic evangelist who spread dangerous fire-and-brimstone Hell propaganda meant to scare people into changing their ways. He famously made horror movies showing sinners getting punished for their supposed sins.

Maxine Minx’s father parallels this motivation and personality. Earnest records all the murders he commits, purportedly after he offered the victims redemption, and they turned it down. He intends to make a movie with all the footage showing what happens to people who commit sins. The biggest difference between The Burning Hell and Earnest’s movie in MaXXXine is that Estus Pirkle didn’t really kill the victims in the movie.

6 Scream 3 (2000)

A slasher comedy movie with a major central mystery.

Of all the major movies MaXXXine draws from, Scream 3 is seemingly the only movie made in this millennium that Ti West used as inspiration. The third Scream movie takes place in Hollywood and follows Gale Weathers, Dwight Riley, and Sidney Prescott, who try to solve the mystery of who’s killing off the cast of the fictional movie Stab 3 . On a broader level, Scream 3 and MaXXXine have almost identical tones. They balance dark and twisted with the comedy on the verge of satire. Both movies also center on a murder mystery.

However, the two horror films include a more direct parallel, with Ti West’s film copying one scene from the predecessor. In Scream 3 , Sidney Prescott gets chased through the movie set that looks like her hometown. MaXXXine mirrors this by having Maxine Minx run through the Hollywood Studios backlot while being chased by John Labat.

5 Don’t Open Till Christmas (1984)

A british exploitation slasher movie.

Ti West’s MaXXXine takes inspiration from the 1984 exploitation slasher movie Don’t Open Till Christmas about halfway through the film. In Don’t Open Till Christmas , a man wearing a grinning mask murders people dressed as Santa Claus in London during the holidays. Scotland Yards’ Chief Inspector Ian Harris and a mysterious reporter named Giles work together to try and solve the murders. MaXXXine walks the line between a pastiche and an exploitation thriller, and the scene inspired by Don’t Open Till Christmas pushes the movie into the former category.

In the conclusion to Ti West's X trilogy, the character Elizabeth Bender describes her movie The Puritan in a meta way that also describes MaXXXine.

In MaXXXine , the killer goes to a viewing booth to watch a sex worker dance and masturbate. This parallels the Don’t Open Till Christmas scene, where a Santa impersonator goes to a peep show , at which point the grinning masked man slaughters him. It’s a clear homage to the underrated ‘80s horror flick.

4 Body Double (1984)

A neo-noir exploitation erotic thriller.

Body Double (1984)

One of the most apparent movies that inspired Ti West when making MaXXXine is the 1984 neo-noir erotic thriller Body Double, co-written, produced, and directed by Brian De Palma. In Body Double , a man named Jake Skully house-sits in Hollywood, where he watches a blonde woman through the window. When she’s murdered, he investigates the crime, bringing him into the city’s dark underbelly of drugs and the adult entertainment industry.

The most fundamental similarity between Body Double and MaXXXine is the fact that both movies include themes of voyeurism, sex work, and violence in Hollywood. However, there are other parallels as well. MaXXXine and Body Double use gritty visuals, neon lighting, and the same color palette. Additionally, the kill scenes look remarkably alike in these two horror films. There are so many thematic, visual, and narrative similarities that it can’t be a coincidence. Ti West must have intentionally drawn from Body Double .

3 Hardcore (1979)

A crime thriller with erotic elements.

Most of the time, MaXXXine uses homages for a single scene or character. However, the movie takes a different approach when it comes to the 1979 movie Hardcore , directed by Paul Schrader. Ti West’s movie draws its basic premise from Schrader’s classic crime thriller . In Hardcore , a religious Midwestern man named Jake Van Dorn goes to Hollywood to find his daughter Kristin, who he believes has been indoctrinated into sex work. It turns out that Jake Van Dorn and Kristin have very different values that conflict with one another in Hardcore .

In MaXXXine , the televangelist Earnest Miller follows his daughter Maxine Minx to Hollywood to “save” her from what he perceives as evils, despite the fact that there’s nothing wrong with doing ethical and consensual sex work. In reality, Maxine and Earnest hold different values in MaXXXine , like that of Jake and Kristin in Hardcore .

2 Peeping Tom (1960)

An exploitation thriller-horror.

Peeping Tom

One movie that MaXXXine uses for inspiration thematically and stylistically is the 1960 movie Peeping Tom . The classic thriller-horror film follows a serial killer who records his murders – especially targeting sex workers – for his own gratification. MaXXXine uses the same approach of showing someone with a video camera recording everything. The movie even looks through the camera at one point, similar to Peeping Tom . This meta filming approach provides a level of disconnect between the murders and the audiences, raising questions about how people engage with sex and violence.

On a broader level, both MaXXXine and Peeping Tom focus on voyeurism and exploitation. Each murder feels personal and targeted, even though the murderer doesn’t actually know any of his victims. The killers might look down on people who choose to use their bodies in a way that they view as exploitative, but they are engaging in just as much exploitation by making their movies.

1 Ms. 45 (1981)

A rape-revenge horror movie.

Though it isn’t the prevailing genre of MaXXXine , the exploitation thriller pastiche takes some inspiration from rape revenge movies, specifically Ms. 45 . The 1981 film follows a woman named Than who gets raped twice in one day, leading her to become a spree killer that targets men. Two main scenes in Ti West’s movie draw from the 1981 revenge horror – the alleyway and party scenes. In Ms. 45 , Thana’s first rape occurs in an alley when her masked attacker pulls out a gun. MaXXXine draws on this while spinning the outcome.

Instead of Maxine Minx getting raped, she pulls a gun on him and forces him to perform fellatio on the gun barrel and steps on his scrotum. Later in the movie, the titular main character uses a party as a cover to plan John Labat’s brutal murder in MaXXXine . This mirrors Ms. 45 , where Thana attends a party as a cover for her plan to murder many men. Ultimately, MaXXXine would have felt incomplete without a reference to the rape-revenge movies that were popular in the 80s.

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‘Mother, Couch’ Review: The Family That Stays Together

A stubborn matriarch played by Ellen Burstyn lodges in a furniture store and wages emotional warfare with her adult children.

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By Glenn Kenny

In a furniture store devoid of customers, an elderly matriarch, referred to only as “Mother” and played by Ellen Burstyn, has settled on a couch. That is, she’s really settled on a couch. She’s sitting on it and refusing to budge. She promises that if anyone tries to move or carry her off the couch, she will struggle to the extent that, “I will fall and hit my head so hard it will burst.”

No one in “Mother, Couch” is inordinately pragmatic, or else this movie, written and directed by Niclas Larsson, adapted from a novel by Jerker Virdborg, would be much shorter. Granted, Burstyn’s character, first seen in black wraparound sunglasses and sporting a helmet-like flip hairdo, is a formidable figure. And stranding her multi-accented adult children (it’s explained, weakly) in the store with her over a few days is one way to effect yet another cinematic contemplation on Why Families Are Dysfunctional.

Mother’s children are Ewan McGregor’s David, buttoned-down and flying apart; Rhys Ifans’s Gruffudd, medium shambolic by default; and Lara Flynn Boyle’s Linda, snarling and swearing a blue streak.

Apple, meet tree: Mother is stubborn, and frankly mean, albeit more formal in her language. “I never wanted any children, David,” she practically snarls after having given this son a nasty cut on the palm that won’t heal. Hey! Symbolism! Or, one should say, another bit of symbolism.

While the film’s premise may suggest black comedy (and the sometimes fake-jaunty, fake-portentous score by Christopher Bear underscores that idea), Burstyn’s character, which the actor plays with her customary expertise, is so utterly disagreeable that viewing the picture is a mostly anxious experience with not much of a reward at the end, which shifts to magic realist mode for lack of anywhere better to go.

Mother Couch Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 36 minutes. In theaters.

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Alien: Romulus

While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe. While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe. While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.

• Fede Alvarez
• Rodo Sayagues
• Dan O'Bannon
• Isabela Merced
• Cailee Spaeny
• Archie Renaux
• 1 Critic review
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• Trivia Director Fede Alvarez sought out special effects crew from Aliens (1986) to work on the creatures. Physical sets, practical creatures, and miniatures were used wherever possible to help ground later VFX work.
• Connections Featured in Nerdrotic: The Acolyte: Force is Female CONFIRMED? The Death of Theaters - The Real BBC @MauLer @HeelvsBabyface (2024)
• When will Alien: Romulus be released? Powered by Alexa
• August 16, 2024 (United States)
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• Origo Studios, Budapest, Hungary
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‘Second Chance’ Review: A Soothing Mantra of Himalayan Hope and Healing

At the top of the world, a young woman at her lowest ebb finds solace in simplicity, friendship and the sweet purring of a kitten in Indian writer-director Subhadra Mahajan's gorgeously restorative debut.

By Jessica Kiang

Jessica Kiang

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It’s hard to get a cellphone signal up in the high mountains of Himachal Pradesh, in Northern India. Especially in the dead of winter when deep snowdrifts absorb all sound and jagged encircling ridges form an impenetrably icy barrier. But without WiFi coverage, Subhadra Mahajan’s spectacular and serene “ Second Chance ” suggests, a different, deeper kind of connection is possible — to these stark, unearthly landscapes, to the people who’ve made their lives among them, and perhaps even to the self you might have lost touch with through trauma or tiredness, down in the busy, noisy world below. 

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DP Swapnil Suhas Sonawane’s monochrome photography is breathtaking in the best way: elegant without overtly imposing its artistry on already beautiful settings. And just like Nia herself, Mahajan’s tender, airy screenplay benefits from time spent away from the consideration of her trauma, when in lovely, graceful scenes of domesticity and humor, we follow Sunny playing or Bhemi cooking. Bhemi even has a little flirtation going with a twinkly-eyed local shepherd (Ganga Ram) who is unstinting in his praise of her fine-spun yarn and her delicious onion fritters, and with whom her conversations range from light joshing to more profound observations on the way their natural environment is changing.

“Our Mother Earth is depleted and sad,” says the shepherd wistfully. “If we continue to destroy her like this, it will be the end of us all.”

“Well, at least you’ve lived your life long enough,” replies Bhemi tartly. 

This is a remarkably accomplished debut feature, premiering in Karlovy Vary’s Proxima competition just a couple of months after Mahajan’s compatriot, Payal Kapadia, won the Grand Prix in Cannes for “All We Imagine as Light.” It may be too early to declare these two new female Indian filmmakers the vanguard of a movement, but their movies do share a certain, wise-beyond-their-years poetry. It’s exemplified in a wonderful moment in “Second Chance,” when Nia, horrified to find Bhemi doing the dishes under an outdoor tap in subzero weather is gently pranked into thinking the water is hot.

A few of the more effortfully dramatized moments, such as an awkward visit Nia pays to a recently married ex, or a confrontation with the guy who got her pregnant, are tentative and slightly stilted. But these exchanges are brief and their theatricality only serves to highlight the ease of the film’s natural register, which is murmured and grateful as an answered prayer. Up here, in the quiet, Mahajan’s film tells of a space where, if you need them, there are not just second chances, but second or third ones — infinite chances that stretch like snow-capped Himalayan peaks, as far as the eye can see.

Reviewed at Karlovy Vary Film Festival (Proxima). July 5, 2024. Running time: 104 MIN. 

• Production: (India) A Metanormal, Latent Pictures production. (World sales: Diversion, Bangkok.) Producer: Shyam Bora. Executive Producers: Swapnil Suhas Sonawane, Pan Nalin. Co-producers: Bhaskar Hazarika, Sidharth Meer, Naren Chandavarkar.
• Crew: Director, writer: Subhadra Mahajan. Camera: Swapnil Suhas Sonawane. Editor: Tinni Mitra. Music: Quan Bay.
• With: Dheera Johnson, Thakri Devi, Kanav Thakur, Ganga Ram,  Rajesh Kumar, Shaurya Bastola, Tarini Sud, Dr Bishan Dass Shashni, Yuki the cat. (Hindi, English, Kullavi dialogue)

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