Love Me review – Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun explore love in oddball sci-fi

At Sundance, a festival geared towards acquisition with unsold films going for the hard sell, there’s something intriguing about those that withhold. While for mysterious romance Love Me, the involvement of the Oscar nominees Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun was enough by itself to vault the film to the top of many wishlists, its logline was less of a sure thing. A post-apocalyptic love story between a buoy and a satellite was something that people would have to see to understand and so there was an unusual sense of curious excitement in the air at its packed-out premiere, no one quite sure what was about to be experienced.

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But while the curiosity might have sustained itself for the most part, the excitement slowly faded, the film an alluring but ultimately failed experiment. Rather than giving us something we truly haven’t seen before, it falls too closely in line with other recent films that have felt less like standalone acts of original creation and more like discarded Black Mirror episodes. While not quite as deadening as Foe or Fingertips, it leaves us with a similar sense of frustration, the not particularly gratifying act of witnessing an idea being workshopped in real time, happier with itself than we are watching it.

It starts with a bold, and bleak, look into the future. Humanity is long gone and a digitally assisted smart buoy (voiced by Stewart) is all alone. One day, it encounters a satellite (voiced by Yeun), charged with explaining the end of the world to any life form it might encounter. Their fractured communication starts to evolve into something more human as they develop a sense of what it is to be alive via shreds of a long-expired internet. As they get closer, they start to change form, modelled after two vacuous influencers, playing at being in love before starting to question what real love is.

The first-time film-makers Sam and Andy Zuchero have certainly not picked the easy route with their debut, spanning billions of years and combining animation, live-action and some stunning, expansive visuals. But ambition only takes the film so far, a big swing aiming to comment on and cover so much, too much, that it deserves only admiration for trying rather than applause for succeeding. The initial scenes, which bring to mind the opening stretch of Wall-E, are the most endearing, as the two objects try to work out a way to communicate and define themselves. The swerve that follows, as the film turns the pair into animated avatars of the influencers that one of then covets, has its moments, with the pair stuck in an endless cycle of making Blue Apron spon-con trying to break out of the formula into something authentic. But the film’s grasp of the internet and its jabs at social media feel too broad and far too dated, repeatedly hammering easy targets into nothing.

The Zucheros flit between almost compelling quandaries about the trap of idealised straight romance and the hell of expected performance within it to more rote and repetitive observations about gender. It’s all strangely stacked against its female character, who is painted as an irrational, deceitful nag, while its male lead is merely trying to find himself outside of the dynamic she has forced on to them. A more entertaining film might have turned this into a thriller but with its loudly beating heart on its sleeve, Love Me wants to be a sweeping romance instead, insisting us to reach emotional heights that the film just can’t take us to (a score that intercuts between lush Michael Giacchino-esque highs and intrusively annoying jazzy lows doesn’t help matters). It feels like a short that was expanded without enough thought for how it might work as a whole movie and by the end, even that curiosity has faded too.

Like Stewart, Yeun has worked hard to distance himself from the limits of the genre franchise that made him, taking left-field turns when offered, picking actor over movie star, and this marks another interestingly offbeat choice for them both. They do what they can with their multiple personas but there’s forever a disconnect with what we’re being told and how we’re then made to feel, in a film wanting desperately to be loved that makes it near impossible.

• Love Me is screening at the Sundance film festival and is seeking distribution