SNAPSHOT
Long after humanity’s extinction, a buoy and a satellite meet online and fall in love. As filmmakers Sam & Andy demonstrate in their wildly imaginative debut feature, telling the love story of a smart buoy and an orbiting satellite that spans a billion years and probes the mysteries of being and consciousness requires legit storytelling dexterity. Love Me’s whimsically philosophical, shape-shifting structure ingeniously weaves together the real, the virtual, and the surreal. Its star-crossed, web-paired metallic protagonists — inhabited in different forms by Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun — awkwardly navigate romance and companionship, equipped only with untold petabytes of archived web data, social media, and online videos. (courtesy Sundance) Love Me is co-written & co-directed by filmmaking husband-wife duo Andrew “Andy” Zuchero & Sam Zuchero, directing their first feature film together after a few short films and other projects previously. It’s produced by Kevin Rowe, Luca Borghese, Ben Howe, Shivani Rawat, & Julie Goldstein. (courtesy First Showing)
One of my great loves are quirky stories that impart some sage lessons about life and which carry some real emotional heft.
Love Me seems to tick all those boxes, serving up some truly affecting ruminative truths in a whimsically original storytelling structure that asks us to consider what life is really like and to value it anew as something truly special.
That’s often hard to know when we’re deep in the midst of the bog standard and unceasing challenges of day-to-day life; after all, what’s special about that?
Well, plenty as it turns out if we stop and think a little, and this film looks like a beautiful journey to the sheer joyous wonders of being alive which are there for us to see if we just dig down a little.
Following its premiere at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival, Love Me releases in select U.S. cinemas on 25 January; no Australian release advised at this time.