AI Takes Center Stage in 'Love Me': Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun Explore Post-Human Romance

'Love Me' review: Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun explore love at the end of the world

Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun play lovers in "Love Me." Credit: Bleecker Street On its surface, Love Me might look like a romance. It begins with a protagonist yearning for love so intensely that she models herself -- and her relationship with her beau -- upon a couple of influencers online. To her, regimented date nights of Blue Apron meals, Friends binge-watching, and onesie pajamas resembling animals are the path to bliss. But the jolting surprise of this tender drama, which world premiered at Sundance 2024, is that it's not about romantic love as much as it is about learning to love yourself. Even if you're a sentient robot. In Love Me, Kristen Stewart stars as an AI buoy that is programmed to update itself as the world around it demands. But the world around her is bereft of organic lifeforms, and she has evolved to be self-aware but desperately lonely. That is, until she spots an orbiting satellite (voiced by Steven Yeun), designed to share the uploaded wealth of human knowledge to anyone who asks. At first, their exchanges are brief, awkward, and -- yes -- robotic. But through her desire to connect, the buoy begins to define herself -- naming herself "Me" and masquerading as a "lifeform" -- and pulls the satellite, who she dubs Iam (pronounced I am), along with her. What seems to be a chic, star-studded spin on Wall-E steadily and poignantly evolves into a story of finding yourself despite the all-too-human social pressures to be something else. Set long after humans are nothing but a memory, Love Me is a bittersweet but beautiful film that is resoundingly humane. Right now, we live in a world in which our reality is filtered through social media algorithms, influencers, and endless ads aiming to sell you that you are not enough. (But you could be, if you spent money on [insert quick-fix product here]). This is the human world that Me finds as she explores the relics of the internet through Iam's server. She thrills over videos of babies laughing, but is particularly drawn to Deja (Kristen Stewart in a live-action performance), a gorgeous influencer with long blonde hair, and her pleasant and picture-perfect boyfriend, Liam (Steven Yeun). Of all the walks of life and all the representations of humanity she can find, this is Me's ideal, which she pursues by manipulating Iam into following her lead. More than the forgotten robots of a long-dead human civilization, they become animated avatars of their own making...modeled after long-dead lifestyle gurus. Together, they build a virtual home, complete with a kitchen stocked with ice cream, a couch for cuddling, and a ring light to capture every joyful performance of romance. But troubles arise as Iam begins to realize he's acting and not feeling. As he pursues authenticity by breaking their date night routine, Me feels betrayed, and their relationship is threatened. Can Me grow beyond being a Deja wannabe? Who will she become next? Will growing isolate her from Iam or bring them closer together? Crafted by The Zucheros, co-writers/directors/partners Sam and Andy Zuchero, Love Me's progression is charmingly chaotic, leaning on YouTube nature documentaries, self-help sermons, and viral videos as a shorthand of human experience. This reflection might well make contemporary audiences cringe in familiarity, seeing live-action humans being a dizzying mix of charming, earnest, and aggravating. But as Me urges Iam into joining her in a virtual world of their own making, the aesthetic progresses to a CG animation. There, Me's insecurities are hidden behind a sweet Pixar-like avatar. Even Iam's dismay that he can't feel being tickled is softened by this visual aesthetic of warm colors and round shapes. The couple will evolve into live-action performances, which not only gives Stewart and Yeun a unique continuation in their portrayals, but also the challenge of distinguishing Me and Iam from Deja and Liam. Essentially, as they strive to be authentic over imitations, they become more real in their appearance. And in every beat, they are achingly open. Kristen's voice in the first act goes from robotic to timidly curious to boldly flirtatious. Yeun shifts from a familiar Siri mix of politeness and frankness to a bouncy joy, then tense uncertainty, and into full-on TikTok meltdown mode. As their characters shift from jaunty animated avatars to carefully crafted human forms -- complete with flaws -- the performances carry a new emotional weight, as both feel out the shift in tone. Props to the Zucheros; however, who refuse to abandon the weirdness of their premise or online courtship. A satisfying steamy yet surreal sex scene creates a unique space for their self-actualizing characters to explore their desires and bodies. Moments like this, where their heroes' self-expression is a messy bramble of ideas, colliding imitation with their own impulses, sets Love Me apart from a sea of sweet but superficial rom-coms. At every opportunity, the Zucheros devotedly embrace the messiness, not only of romantic love, but of loving yourself. Love Me is a celebration of that process. An oddly hopeful movie set in on a dead Earth, Love Me is about how even a robot might wade through the mess of societal expectations, internet white noise, and chronic self-doubt, and be able to achieve the truly radical -- self-acceptance. That the path to such a wholesome message is littered with debris of the best and worst of the internet (including an audio clip of a certain president), is a crucial part of the message. Perhaps we too can be like Me, a flower blooming from a crack in the concrete, a buoy finding bliss at the end of the world.

Kristen Stewart, Steven Yeun on exploring humanity as AI robots in new film 'Love Me'

Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun dive headfirst into a love story between a buoy and a satellite spanning billions of years after the end of human civilization in the new film "Love Me." The project, in theaters Jan. 31 from filmmakers Andy and Sam Zuchero in their feature film directorial debut, explores themes of identity, love and what it truly means to exist. Yeun said what drew him to the project was the "real wild and earnest swing that it was." Stewart called the film "a cool opportunity to call into question authenticity, because we're so obsessed with it," adding that being called fake is "worse than the F-word." "It is like a long, big, elaborate acting exercise that kind of results in this acknowledgement of individuality being important, but also the fact that we are so linked," Stewart continued. "Humans are... we're all the same." The predominant way in which Stewart and Yeun's buoy and satellite characters evolve throughout the course of the film -- going from robots to being animated and finally resulting in live-action forms of themselves -- is by learning about humanity via one of the only things left behind by humans: social media. The primary subjects on which they base themselves are a YouTube influencer couple, Déja and Liam, who do things like celebrate cheesy date nights, unironically love "Friends" and have a catchphrase -- "Welcome to 'another day, another Déja ... and Liam.'" The directors said the initial idea was to get actual influencers to play Déja and Liam, but ultimately they asked Stewart and Yeun -- the former isn't on social media and the latter isn't very active on social media -- to play them in addition to their AI counterparts. Of the evolution of their characters, Yeun said his satellite "wants to be defined by somebody or something" when he meets Stewart's buoy -- an event he says makes the character eventually "come to terms with the fact that he wouldn't have ever been defined or exist in this way if it wasn't for the other person." "I think even now, having had distance from the film but then coming back here, you realize that your mind can really cook up a lot of projections of what you think reality is," Yeun added. Stewart's character, meanwhile, is the instigator of questioning who they are from the beginning. "As soon as you put a period on any sentence -- lack of change, lack of growth -- that's death," she said. "I feel like the strive towards expression is so much more defining of who you are versus how you finish that sentence and how you put a period on it." "We get to know ourselves every single day, and it's fun to try and put that into words," Stewart continued. "And we have to do it in order to, like, stay engaged with being alive." Stewart, who has become an arthouse darling since "Twilight" by opting for projects like "Clouds of Sils Maria," "Personal Shopper" and "Spencer," praised Yeun for being "a muscular actor" to share a scene with in such a thought-provoking film as "Love Me." "He is down," Stewart said of her co-star's willingness. "Steven's got this, like, very serious fieriness." Yeun, who rose to fame on the zombie horror series "The Walking Dead" and has earned critical acclaim for his work in "Burning," "Minari" and "Beef," said it was Stewart's "deep honesty" that drew him to working with her, praising her "connection and willingness and courage." Sam Zuchero said what drew her to casting Stewart and Yeun was the fact that "they're explorers, they're risk takers, and they, you know, are interested in things that are outside of the box." For Andy Zuchero, it was that he believed these two actors both had "curious and flexible minds where they could, you know, make a love story -- but in the context of humanity's extinction." With "Love Me," Andy Zuchero said he thought it would be "really fun to shoot a live-action WALL-E,'" referencing the 2008 Pixar film about a garbage-cleaning robot who falls in love with another robot named EVE. In addition to being a more adult and conceptual film, "Love Me" also differs from "WALL-E" in that it explores one of the biggest technological jumps of recent years: the emergence of AI. "These things are extensions of us. If anything, the thing that's difficult ... to talk about [when it come to AI] is you're really kind of talking about a portion of yourself, of ourselves," Yeun said, with Stewart agreeing that "they're mirrors" of us. "Almost like the part that you don't want to lose control of, which is so scary," Stewart continued. "When we're like, 'Who knows what it could do.' It's like ... are you talking about yourself right now? Are you scared of the evil within? Because, me too." The film doesn't view AI through the lens of good or -- as it is more often in sci-fi offerings -- bad, but more so as a means to explore the characters, and by extension ourselves, as they continue to evolve. "At the time, we had a ... 3-year-old son who I thought a lot about, like, how he's going to learn how to be human through this kind of branded social content that we have on the internet that's driven by algorithms that don't have emotions," Sam Zuchero said. "And so that was, you know, an inspiration for it." Instead of making a judgment on whether AI is to be loved or feared, Andy Zuchero pointed out that AI in the film continues on even after all of humanity is gone, saying it's "a warning to us that maybe the next love story won't feature us if we don't get our act together."