The word ‘Her’ instantly sets the scene for the film to come. The film is about a relati

The word ‘Her’ instantly sets the scene for the film to come. The film is about a relationship, yet it is not titled ‘We’ or ‘Us’, but ‘Her.’ The unbalance can already be seen in the title. The term ‘Her’ shows a one-sided perspective; it is not the story of a man and a woman, but a man fixated by a woman. The title ‘Her’ set in feelings of unease, that became all too familiar for me throughout this film. The film Her directed by Spike Jonze follows the story of Theodore Twombly, a young man living in the not so distant future. Numbed by his loneliness Theodore lives in a world where technology has caused people to shut each other out. His divorce hangs over his head and he decides to try the new operating system technology – ‘OS1’, in an attempt to cure his heavy heart. He meets the husky-voiced Samantha, his OS, who seems to understand him better than anyone else can. Her tracks Theodore as his relationship with Samantha grows, blossoms and evolves into something more than he could ever have expected. Her is all about life. Block colours burst from almost every scene, Theodore’s piercing blue eyes cut through the screen. Red is extremely prominent and almost always seen on Theodore’s clothes. Perhaps this is because of the relation between red and love, as Theodore seems to be a romantic. The film is filled with irony and contrast. The brightly lit day scenes contrast greatly with the sepia toned night time scenes, when Theodore can no longer ignore his aching loneliness. The setting is a bright and thrumming city, yet everyone in it is dead to the world. Communication without phones and headpieces is almost unheard of. It was this irony in the film that sunk deep for me. Theodore is a colourful and visually interesting person, yet before he meets Samantha he is dead inside and numb to the world he lives in, he worries ‘sometimes I think I have felt everything I’m ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I’m not gonna feel anything new.’ Samantha is an operating system, yet she is in love with life, filled with wonder and awe. She teaches Theodore how to see the beauty in the world again, how to get out of his own head. There is something quite disturbing about when a person needs an artificial intelligence to teach them how to live. It was that painful irony that changed how I viewed the film and haunted me afterwards. I couldn’t see their relationship as a genuine romance because I couldn’t get past the fact that Theodore was so dead and Samantha so alive. Another idea that intrigued me and that I thought about long after the film ended, is the idea of love and whether it can be manufactured. The film really pushes the limits of what people understand love to be, and it made me question how I define it. Is it a raw emotion, something that comes from the heart, something that only a living, breathing human could ever feel? Or is it something that can be manufactured? Found in an OS? As I started to get to know Theodore, already I began to question his perception of love, and society’s perception of love at the time. Theodore worked at a company called Beautiful Handwritten Letters; his job was to manufacture love. Not only romantic love, but also family love and the love found in friendship. However, writing love letters on behalf of other people was what he did best. Knowing that this is his job, and that people actually hire him to write their love letters, showed me how the values in this futuristic world were different to those today. The standard and definition of love in this film had become questionable. I see love as about connecting, relating and engaging with others, yet everyone in the film blocked people out through their earpieces and headphones. Is it possible to find true love in a world where face-to-face communication is increasingly rare? After watching Her, I was left with an overwhelming feeling of unease. On the surface, I can see how the characters could be considered likeable and how Theodore and Samantha’s relationship could be seen as romantic. Yet personally, I could not get past the undertone of creepiness. Too many aspects of the film gave off unnatural and unsettling vibes, from the startlingly bright colours to the odd social norms of the fictional society. Interestingly, its depiction of the future could be interpreted as dystopian or utopian. This film blurs the lines between moral and immoral, romantic and creepy, and this is a terrifying and haunting thought. -Hannah -- source link

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