CAPTCHA'd my Heart!
"I'm Not a Robot" (2023) Review
Academy Award-winning short film “I’m Not a Robot” (2023) does more in 22 minutes than Companion does with similar concepts in an hour and a half.
As far as media exploring romance between humans and robots, this is one of best pieces I’ve seen so far. I’m working on a novel about a woman who’s in love with her sex robot, so I’ve seen quite a lot of this stuff.
“I’m Not a Robot” was an excellent piece of cinema from the visuals to pacing to dialogue, plot and everything in between. I highly recommend it!
The main character, Lara (Ellen Parren), captivates. Her micro-expressions portray her confusion after failing repeated captcha tests, and we can see her piece together the truth about her origin without the dialogue having to spell out everything. Some things are left unexplained, like how widespread robots are and what their roles are in society. However, that’s my only real criticism, and it does answer these questions to a level that’s totally sufficient for a short film.
A central theme in “I’m Not a Robot” is that lines are blurring between humans and robots. Having Lara work as a music producer was a brilliant choice for her character because it defies the usual ‘robot personality’ stereotypes. The film showing AI having similar creative and social capabilities to humans could lead to a world where we don’t know what we are. This new world could contain love; Lara’s human boyfriend begs her to believe him when he says what they have is real. But no matter how advanced to robotics get, the end of the film proves that we can never escape heartbreak.
The other main theme is a question of what it means to be a free person, especially a free woman. Lara‘s boyfriend and a woman from the organization that made Lara (Either a company or research institute. We don’t know and it doesn’t matter for the story) assure Lara multiple times that she has free will. I won’t spoil the ending or the biggest reveal, but essentially one of the first things that Lara wants to do when she learns the truth is to die. Her whole life was made of fabricated memories. She feels inferior to human women. She doesn’t know if she can die, and she has a very humanlike impulse to find out.
Some viewers might say Lara’s reaction is disproportionate, but I think it was totally reasonable for the situation. More old-school movies might have had her snap and start killing people when she learned she was a bot. I thought for a second that she was going to (that’s how precise the acting is; you can see every thought racing through her mind), and that would’ve been too much. I’m tired of the killer robot trope, especially for female-presenting robots.
“I’m Not a Robot” took the more subtle route in every scenario and that will make it stick with viewers for years to come. It would’ve been so easy to play the premise “woman fails captcha test” for comedy, and that’s exactly what I went in expecting. There are a few laughs. But mostly, it’s an intriguing, heart-pounding thought experiment. The nice thing about “I’m Not a Robot” being a short film is that you can easily watch it again!
I’m having fun with this review series, and I hope you are too! Next time, I’m planning to review I’m Your Man (2021), a German movie about a woman taking part in a research project to build the perfect boyfriend.
What robo-romance story should I review after that?