![]() Give or take some faulty wiring, Tom is an immaculate humanoid robot built for human companionship, one of many manufactured in an icy-white lab - not a bar at all - overseen by Sandra Hüller’s dead-eyed functionary. He quotes specific Rilke verses on command without pausing for thought, he gives compliments that appear written by committee (“Your eyes are like two mountain lakes I could sink into”), and he rumbas with mechanical fluidity, at least until his neck gets trapped in one repeated, glitchy spasm. ![]() Something seems off about Tom (Stevens) the second 40-something academic Alma (Maren Eggert) is introduced to him at what appears to be an elite Berlin singles bar, and it’s not just the eerie persistence of his blue-eyed gaze. At any rate, Schrader’s beguiling Berlinale competition entry could cultivate a substantial audience of its own in international art houses - abetted by the rising profile of its helmer (fresh from her Emmy win for Netflix’s “Unorthodox”) and the canny casting of British heartthrob Dan Stevens as a boyfriend entirely too good to be human. Squint slightly at the screen and you can just about envision Sandra Bullock in an Americanized version of this material, if not for a script that repeatedly wraps formula in philosophy, defamiliarizing matters in the process. ![]() The appealingly peculiar result lands somewhere between “Ex Machina” and “Toni Erdmann” on the tonal spectrum, if you can imagine such a hybrid - yet also riffs playfully on a wealth of hoary romantic comedy tropes, including the uptight career woman with no room for a love life, and the strictly-for-practical-reasons fake relationship that blooms into something complicated. ![]()
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