To Be Human

My monthly deep dives into genres provide opportunity for me to explore titles I might have otherwise skipped over. Action Adventure April is my time to deep dive trashy action and enjoy all the dumb, meat-sack fisticuffs I can find. Jocular Jesting July lets me find comedies that I barely remember anymore, films that have fallen by the wayside, likely for good reason, so I can watch them again and see why. And then Sci-Fi Saga September is the perfect time for me to see what indie and weird sci-fi is out there that I’ve previously ignored just to see if there are any hidden gems.

A film like Life Like is one I probably would have ignored any other month. An indie drama about a married couple that, through a change in circumstances, find their happy, loving marriage suddenly falling apart isn’t exactly the normal genre fare I’ll cover on this website. That’s something for The A.V.Club or The Dissolve (anyone else remember The Dissolve?) to cover, telling everyone how great this indie film (no one is going to watch) actually is so they should go and watch it (which most people never do). It’s artsy and low-budget and it gets all the cinema snobs all hot and bothered.

Honestly, even with it showing up in my Sci-Fi queue on Amazon PrimeWhile Netflix might be the largest streaming seervice right now, other major contenders have come into the game. One of the biggest, and best funded, is Amazon Prime, the streaming-service add-on packing with free delivery and all kinds of other perks Amazon gives its members. And, with the backing of its corporate parent, this streaming service very well could become the market leader. I still probably would have ignored it if not for the fact that Stephen Strait was in it and I’ll pay attention to any action that previously appeared in The Expanse. That series was great, and all the actors in it were fantastic. If I see one of them show up somewhere else, no matter how small and low-key the film might be, I’ll check it out. Also reminds me to go back and watch Sky High again, as that film was fun…

But I digress. Life Like follows James (Drew Van Acker) and Sophie (Addison Timlin), a married couple living a free and independent life in New York City. James is a trust fund baby, but he’s been having a carefree life with his wife, Sophie, as they build their relationship without any worries. But then his father dies, and James has to move back to the old mansion so he can be nearer the family business (which is a massive conglomerate that gets very little attention outside of a couple of “deals” that plague James as his B-plot).

This move upsets Sophie. She’s a free spirit who loved living in the city, and she’s not at all happy suddenly being one of the one percent, with a massive mansion and a whole crew of servants. So she fires them, taking on the responsibility for the house all on her own. But James realizes this is going to put a strain on their relationship, so he convinces her to go to a company making humanoid androids, and they eventually settle on taking in Henry (Strait), their new servant bot. But Henry seems a little too life-like, a little too real, and the more time he spends with Sophie the more human his A.I. becomes. James gets jealous, Sophie gets angry, and the very thing that was supposed to help their relationship seems to be driving it further apart.

I have to be honest, if not for Stephen Strait I would have shut this movie off within the first fifteen minutes. The film is insufferable, and that’s largely because the two main characters, James and Sophie, are just the absolute worst. James sucks because he uproots his whole life and forces his wife to move out of the city she loves into a countryside she doesn’t know, dumping an entire mansion on a girl that has only lived in apartments, and then he gets upset when she’s not universally happy about everything from day one. He never tries to see her point of view, never thinks that maybe the move was a bad idea for her. He’s a self-centered asshole who cares more about his father’s legacy and his family’s company than he does about the woman he married.

Sophie, meanwhile, isn’t really any better. She thinks she’s a free and independent free spirit who can do everything on her own, but she married a dude with a trust fund and the two of them clearly haven’t had to want for money the whole time they’ve been together. They live in a huge apartment in NYC, in a building with a doorman. They aren’t hurting for cash. And then when James’s father dies, she gets upset that she has to move to the countryside to be with James while he runs the company, which is exactly the deal she signed up for when she married him. Oh no, the very thing that was bound to happen actually happened. Poor me.

The problems with their marriage are because they don’t communicate, and they each, obviously, had different expectations for how their relationship would grow over the years. James clearly thought he was getting a trophy wife that would hang on his arm while he took care of the business. Sophie clearly thought she was getting a man with an unlimited expense account without having to ever worry about where that money came from. Both of them are trash humans living a billionaire lifestyle and feeling shitty about it while the rest of us would give up at least a limb to get there. It’s obnoxious, and following these people around annoyed the shit out of me.

Henry saves the film. The movie goes from being just about these two insufferable people that shouldn’t be together to a story about this robot that moves in and slowly starts to become more human. Except that’s not even really true as (spoilers for a seven year old movie), Henry isn’t actually a robot. Instead, he’s a human that was reprogrammed via deep mind control from a very early age into thinking he was a robot. He, and several others like him that live at the “robotics” company, were all raised by Julian (James D'Arcy) to think they were robots, which Julian seems to think is some kind of improvement for their lives. Honestly, this whole plotline is also awful, but it only works because Strait sells it for all he can.

Stephen Strait puts in a fantastic performance, making Henry both life-like and yet also fairly robotic. The quirks he picks up as his supposed A.I. grows and evolves makes his character interesting. You feel like you’re watching a character come into themselves with Strait’s performance, and the scenes he’s in are the best the film has. It’s honestly just a pity that such a good actor, and their solid performance, is wasted on such a terrible film. I’m glad he got a paycheck for this, as there’s nothing else redeeming about this story at all.

Life Like is a bad film, with bad lead characters and a bad premise that only gets by because one actor really delivered on their character. Which isn’t to say that Acker, Timlin, or D’Arcy are bad, but their characters suck while Henry is actually watchable. If his character were transplanted into a different film, with a different story, I think that would make for a much better film. As it is, though, Life Like is a movie I’ll remember just for how much I hated almost every aspect of it, save one. And then I’ll never go back to watch it again.