In a near-future world that has been baked by a climate apocalypse into a state of existential burnout, a young married couple cling to what’s left of their life together in an isolated American prairie homestead. Inherited from his family, it’s a reproachful remnant of the past: a once-loved wooden foursquare farmhouse surrounded by a graveyard of dead trees in formerly rich agricultural land. There may once have been a spark between Junior (Paul Mescal) and Henrietta (Saoirse Ronan), but now their marriage is as arid and unrewarding as the land they no longer attempt to cultivate.
Then one night a stranger calls: Terrence (Aaron Pierre) is a slick government official who drops a bombshell into their not-so-happy home. Junior has been selected to work on an off-planet space community, and while he is absent he will be replaced, in his home and marriage, by an identical AI replicant. Junior is not thrilled by the idea. But somehow the news jolts some passion back into their atrophied relationship.
The latest from director Garth Davis (Lion) is too clunkily contrived and disingenuous to engage audiences fully, and too reliant on mood over ideas – a parched sand-and-dust colour palette; lots of despairing, sweat-glistening sex scenes – to add much to the human/robot intersection already thoroughly mined by films such as AI: Artificial Intelligence, Blade Runner and After Yang. But for all this, Mescal and Ronan are captivating: her watchful, raw-nerved longing; his stinging sense of betrayal. It almost eases us past an overwrought final twist. Almost, but not quite.
