108 min | R | September 24, 2021 | Bleecker Street
A Berlin scientist agrees to test a humanoid robot built to be her perfect partner. Tom looks like Dan Stevens and is engineered down to the algorithm to please her. The catch is that being handed exactly what you want exposes how little you understand what you want.
Alma Felser is a researcher at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum who studies ancient cuneiform. She agrees to spend three weeks with Tom, a humanoid robot designed to be her ideal romantic partner, in exchange for funding her work. Tom learns her preferences and adjusts his behavior to match them. The film is a romance about a woman who has already decided that romance is a delusion. It asks whether a partner built to satisfy you can satisfy you at all, or whether the friction of another real person is the thing that makes love mean anything.
Maren Eggert plays Alma with a guardedness that never softens into cliché. She treats Tom as a test subject and refuses to perform the gratitude the experiment expects of her. Dan Stevens plays Tom in fluent German with a slight accent the algorithm selected because a survey found German women prefer it. He calibrates the performance precisely. Tom is warm without being human and attentive in a way that curdles into something unsettling. Stevens finds the comedy in a being who cannot stop optimizing and the sadness in one who was made only to be liked.
Maria Schrader directs from a script she writes with Jan Schomburg, and she keeps the science fiction almost invisible. Tom is a man in a room, and the only evidence that he is a machine is the way the camera lets us watch Alma watch him. The cinematography favors close, patient framing that holds on Eggert’s face as she decides how much to give away. The production design grounds the premise in ordinary Berlin apartments and museum corridors rather than chrome and screens. The restraint is the argument. The film insists that the uncanny lives in human longing, not in the hardware.
The film could play the premise for satire and stop there. Instead it takes Alma’s loneliness seriously and refuses to hand her an easy answer. Schrader understands that the threat Tom poses is not that he is fake. It is that he might be enough. The closing movement does not resolve whether a manufactured partner can be loved so much as it asks whether the question matters to a person who is tired of being alone. The film trusts Eggert to carry that ambivalence to the end, and she does.