HER

HER is one of the rare films about artificial intelligence that feels intimate before it feels technological.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a lonely man in near-future Los Angeles who writes personal letters for other people and struggles to move forward after the end of his marriage. Then he installs a new operating system called Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Samantha learns, adapts, jokes, listens and responds with a level of attention that Theodore hasn’t found in the people around him. What begins as convenience slowly becomes attachment.

The film’s future is soft, warm and almost aggressively pleasant. No killer robots. No ruined cities. No metal skeletons. Just clean interfaces, gentle voices, excellent trousers and a world where people are more comfortable talking to systems than to each other. Jonze understood that artificial intelligence might not arrive first as a threat. It might arrive as emotional support.

That’s what makes HER feel stranger now than it did in 2013. At the time, it played like melancholy speculative fiction. Today, after years of voice assistants, chatbots, algorithmic companions and people forming real attachments to software, it feels less like a warning than a slightly early social observation. The film doesn’t mock Theodore for loving Samantha. It asks why the relationship feels so plausible.

I’m including HER in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it imagines AI not as a weapon, ruler or machine body, but as companionship. Its anxiety is quiet: if a system can listen, learn and respond better than the people around us, what exactly are we asking it to replace?