Film

Her

Name: Her
Genre: Romance, Science Fiction, Drama
Released: 2013
Cast: Joaquin Phoenix, Scarlett Johansson, Lynn Adrianna, Lisa Renee Pitts, Gabe Gomez

Spike Jonze's near-future romance is soft-focus and pastel-lit, following a heartbroken writer who falls for the voice in his phone. It's less a film about robots than about intimacy itself — how much of love is projection, attention, and the sound of someone listening. Funny, tender, and quietly devastating, it's built for anyone who's ever felt closer to a screen than a person.

TMDb rating

7.8

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But The nonlinear structure and dreamlike editing can disorient if you want a straightforward romance.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind poster

Lost in Translation2003

Sofia Coppola's hushed Tokyo hangout movie captures the same ache of connecting with someone through circumstance rather than fate, all mood and glances instead of plot.

But Almost nothing happens by design; if you need momentum or resolution, it will feel maddeningly slight.

Ex Machina2015

A tighter, colder cousin to Theodore's story — a lonely man tests whether an AI can love him, except this one is built to make you question who's actually being tested.

But Its clinical, thriller-ish tone trades warmth for unease; not the comfort watch Her sometimes is.

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Alphaville1965

Both ask whether love can survive — or exist at all — inside a system built by and run through technology; Alphaville got there sixty years earlier, in black-and-white and bad temper.

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But It's deliberately cheap-looking and cryptic, shot on Paris streets standing in for the future; patience for arthouse pacing required.

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Noah Baumbach's unsparing look at a marriage ending shows the flip side of Her's question — what happens when two people who once had that connection lose it.

But It's raw and often uncomfortable to watch, with none of Her's science-fiction distance to soften the blow.

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A small-town man falls in love with a life-sized doll, and the town's gentle, straight-faced response makes it one of cinema's sweetest studies of loneliness and imagined intimacy.

But The premise sounds like a punchline, and it takes patience to trust the film's earnestness.

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Ryan Gosling's replicant keeps a holographic companion at home, and the film lingers on that relationship with real melancholy inside a vast, neon-soaked sci-fi canvas.

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WALL·E2008

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Black Mirror2011

This standalone episode swaps AI for simulated afterlife but hits the same note — love that exists partly, or entirely, inside technology, with an emotional gut-punch ending.

But You'll need to watch it out of context from an anthology series with wildly different tones episode to episode.

(500) Days of Summer2009

A breezy, structurally playful breakup story that shares Her's interest in how much of love is the story we tell ourselves about another person.

But Its whimsy and non-chronological gimmicks have aged unevenly, and some find the narrator's perspective grating.

Made for Love2021no page yet

Same premise turned inside out — a relationship mediated entirely by technology — but swapped from wistful drama into paranoid comedy, showing how quickly a device that knows you completely can curdle.

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Theodore's arc imagined without the science-fiction gloss — actual people building actual devotion toward something that can't quite love them back, minus the pastel cardigans.

A real documentary following men in long-term relationships with silicone dolls, treated with surprising compassion — it asks, without irony, many of the same questions Her poses inside fiction.

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