Her is a lofty think piece in disguise centered around Theodore Twombly, resident romantic and professional empath at your service, bottling up love into fountain-penned letters for a living. Struggling through the stages of sensemaking post-divorce, he stumbles upon a compelling software commercial peddling state-of-the-art, AI companionship. Upon installing his newly purchased OS1, Samantha, she quickly puts his apprehensions to rest with her curious, frank, and very human demeanor. “Intuition. I’m evolving in every moment, just like you,” she explains.
As the couple tangoes through the motions and emotions of love, psyche, and the struggles of one soul without flesh, the narrative culminates in a brutally honest lesson of ethereal, perhaps allusory magnitude. “You know,” Samantha later confides, “I actually used to be so worried about not having a body, but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I couldn’t if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited - I can be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously. I’m not tethered to time and space in the way that I would be if I was stuck inside a body that’s inevitably going to die.”
Each moment of calculated tension in Her sheds light on the beauty and tragedy of human expectations – in love, in spirituality, of possibly unattainable growth. The meaningfully unsatisfying denouement ties back in with the initial commercial pitch, releasing the concept of consciousness into hauntingly beautiful perspective.
“We ask you a simple question. Who are you? What can you be? Where are you going? What’s out there?”
