Stream It Or Skip It: ‘I’m Your Man’ on Hulu, the Sweet Story of a Skeptical Woman and Her Potential Robot Boyfriend

Now on Hulu, I’m Your Man stars Downton Abbey slab o’ handsomeness Dan Stevens as an experimental android suitor for Maren Eggert’s lonely anthropologist, because what other character type might so gamefully wrestle with big ideas about what it means to be human? Director Maria Schrader’s film – submitted as Germany’s potential Best International Feature Oscar contender – promises a keen blend of sci-fi and rom-com, which is promising in concept, but how about in execution? Let’s find out.

I’M YOUR MAN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Alma (Maren Eggert) is on a date with a robot who looks exactly like a very handsome human male. She grills him: Do you believe in god? What’s your favorite poetry? Do this math problem. “What’s the saddest thing you can think of?” she asks. “Dying alone,” he replies. Then Tom (Stevens) does one hell of a rumba with her before he short-circuits in the middle of a sentence, prompting handlers to haul him off like a busted Showbiz Pizza automaton. Tom is a dreamboat ’bot crafted to spec for Alma – reluctantly, I have to add. She’s one of a handful of test subjects for the Romantic Partner 2000, talked into the project in exchange for further support for her own underfunded university program. She��s a researcher who spends months and months pouring over ancient tablets, trying to pull metaphor and poetry from hieroglyphics, which just isn’t NEARLY as sexy as Dan Stevens in only silk boxers and a housecoat, raising a sultry eyebrow as he preps a breakfast smorgasbord, just as his Alma-specific algorithm tells him to do.

This isn’t quite the cure for Alma’s slightly mopey singlehood. Her ex, Julian (Hans Low), is a work colleague, so she sees him all the time, and still has a piece of his art hanging over her dining room table. Her father is rapid-spiraling into dementia. Tom comes home with her and she treats him like an appliance, filing him in the cluttered spare bedroom next to the vacuum cleaner. He tidies up her messy apartment and Dewey decimalizes all her books, but she firmly requests he revert the place to its disheveled state. Is he upset by such rejection? He sure seems like the sensitive type, but one wonders how emotionally evolved he can be when he quite literally doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain. One also wonders if he’s anatomically correct and functional, because one is only human when one wants to know exactly how “human” a precisely engineered manbot can be, isn’t one?

At least he’s a learning A.I.: “Soon I’ll say and do things you like with a much greater success rate. Soon every shot will be a bullseye,” he says, clearly not understanding the concept of double-entendres. Alma refuses to warm up to Tom, although his response to life’s inevitable ups and downs and skidding sidetracks puts them on a lovely walk through a forest where his lifelikeness starts to truly shine until she dozes in a meadow and wakes to find him standing among a herd of deer who aren’t afraid of him because he doesn’t smell human. It’s always something, ain’t it? Anyway, Tom evolves and Alma softens all we can do is STAND BY FOR PROFUNDITY.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Her remains the standard-bearer for falling-in-love-with-learning-A.I. movies, especially melancholy ones with smart bits of comedy in them like I’m Your Man. It might be a decent antidote to an emo-sci-fi bummer like Swan Song. One can also picture Tom standing next to Haley Joel Osment in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence, stuck in one place for millennia.

Performance Worth Watching: Stevens is terrific as the potential boyfriendbot who might deserve the benefit of the doubt. And Eggert counters him with a well-rounded, nuanced characterization of a woman who’s smart, skeptical and complicated.

Memorable Dialogue: Alma gets cynical about love and its multitude of scientific processes: “Endorphins, elevated serotonin levels, dopamine release… yippee.”

Sex and Skin: Brief female toplessness during a tender and romantic sex scene.

Our Take: I’m Your Man stirs up some thoughts and feelings about how we’re all “wired,” in the sense that Tom the bot is “wired,” and nature has “wired” us to be “human.” What does “artificial” mean, anyway, or for that matter, “human”? So many questions. So many quote marks. So many slightly heavy-handed contrivances about anthropologists looking back in time for signs of emotional evolvedness and looking to the future for the same – one such contrivance to be exact, which is about 0.47 too many, because the conceit mostly works in a pleasing, thoughtful, slightly slight manner, without the heft of big-brained sci-fi or the broad silliness of mainstream rom-coms.

So the movie treads carefully on the line between genres, striking a unique tone, even when it’s a little dramatically muted. The performances are pleasant, ruminative, a little bit surprising; Eggert isn’t afraid to be prickly and Stevens isn’t afraid to be dorky, complicating the stereotypes other actors and directors might indulge. And Schrader ably guides the narrative to a pensive, poetic conclusion. Not all A.I. big-question contemplaters need to be mind-blowing. Nice movie, and I mean that with all sincerity.

Our Call: STREAM IT. I’m Your Man is better than the premise suggests.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.

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