At Sundance, a festival geared towards acquisition with unsold films going for the hard sell, there’s something intriguing about those that withhold. While for mysterious romance Love Me, the involvement of the Oscar nominees Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun was enough by itself to vault the film to the top of many wishlists, its logline was less of a sure thing. A post-apocalyptic love story between a buoy and a satellite was something that people would have to see to understand and so there was an unusual sense of curious excitement in the air at its packed-out premiere, no one quite sure what was about to be experienced.
But while the curiosity might have sustained itself for the most part, the excitement slowly faded, the film an alluring but ultimately failed experiment. Rather than giving us something we truly haven’t seen before, it falls too closely in line with other recent films that have felt less like standalone acts of original creation and more like discarded Black Mirror episodes. While not quite as deadening as Foe or Fingertips, it leaves us with a similar sense of frustration, the not particularly gratifying act of witnessing an idea being workshopped in real time, happier with itself than we are watching it.
