‘Her’ Was Set in 2025. What Did It Get Right About Love?
The New York Times
Eleven years ago, Spike Jonze’s tech drama imagined a budding romance between a man and his virtual assistant. If anything, the film was holding back.
When “Her” debuted at the New York Film Festival over a decade ago, “swipe left” wasn’t yet a part of the cultural lexicon. Tinder was still in its infancy, a paltry 11 percent of Americans had tried online dating, and the idea of falling for an artificial intelligence companion would have been seen as weird, sad or some combination of the two. (“That might have been the most romantic horror movie I’ve ever seen,” one audience member remarked as she left the 2013 premiere.)
Our cultural preoccupation with A.I. hasn’t let up. A new Broadway musical imagines a retirement home for outmoded helper bots, and a postapocalyptic romance set to be released this month stars Steven Yeun as a lonely satellite and Kristen Stewart as a high-tech buoy. And now that it’s 2025, the year “Her” was set in, it’s clear that the movie was more than merely prescient about our current reality: In many ways, A.I. technology has advanced well beyond what Spike Jonze, the film’s writer and director, originally imagined.
In the movie, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a personal-letter ghostwriter, finds solace after a breakup in an A.I.-powered operating system called Samantha. The virtual assistant, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, is described as “the world’s first artificial intelligence operating system.” In actual 2025, consumers can choose from a range of A.I. companion services, depending on the kind of companionship they’re in the market for.
Platforms including Kindroid, Nomi, Replika and EVA AI invite users to design attractive avatars to their precise specifications, write their companions’ back stories from scratch, message to no end and even have voice calls. In addition to virtual romantic partners, services also offer platonic A.I. friends, patient A.I. tutors, even so-called legacy companions — A.I. facsimiles that seek to replicate the presence of loved ones who have died.
Theodore and Samantha’s unusual relationship begins innocently enough. At first, Theodore seeks the operating system’s help because he needs assistance organizing his computer. As she reminds him of meetings and sorts through his files, man and machine talk and get to know each other. Their relationship evolves into discussions about his trauma from heartbreak and her yearning to be alive. They have phone sex, go on walks together (he totes a small video device in his breast pocket so she can see) and eventually he begins to refer to her as his girlfriend to others.
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