Tell me if you’ve heard this one before: a buoy and a satellite meet on a post-humanity Earth. The satellite asks the buoy “are you a life form?” And the buoy answers yes, quickly scanning the dregs of the internet to offer up a lifelike image, and lands on an influencer. A love story ensues.

There’s no disputing that “Love Me,” the debut feature of husband-and-wife filmmaking team Andy and Sam Zuchero, is unique. Is it unlike anything you’ve ever seen before? Kind of. It has shades of “WALL-E,” “Her,” the documentary “Good Night Oppy” and any other film in which a female robot powered by artificial intelligence is weirdly sexy.

The Zucheros’ film also has the marketing-ready hook of casting two Oscar nominees as a “buoy” and a “satellite” who fall in love; Kristen Stewart plays the buoy, with Steven Yeun as the satellite, sent into space as humanity’s digital tombstone, it’s time capsule, orbiting the planet, checking for life forms. As their connection grows, the buoy becomes Me, and the satellite becomes I Am, first as Sims-like animated figures then eventually, 1 billion years into their complicated situationship, “real” people (or at least real actors’ faces to look at).

This exploration of whether or not artificial intelligence can become “real” (or “human”) poses a lot of questions but doesn’t offer any answers. It’s a tricky film to try and make sense of, because there’s the nagging feeling that the movie doesn’t even know how to make sense of itself, hiding behind high concepts and wordy deflections laden with double meaning.

With its rather utopian view of artificial intelligence and its prospects for romance (an idea that has already been called into question in the year since the film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024), any actual critique about “artificial existence” to be found in “Love Me” lands squarely on influencer culture and the performance of self that people already do online.

Desperately seeking a sense of self, the “buoy” or Me, studies the internet in order to understand how to be human, shuffling through cute animal and baby videos before landing on Deja (also Stewart) and her boyfriend Liam (also Yeun), who broadcast vlogs about their life, including date nights, proposal and wedding. They love “Friends” and ice cream and making spicy vegetable quesadillas from Blue Apron (even after humanity has perished, brands persist). When the Sims-like beings of Me and I Am move in together, Me pushes I Am to perform “date night” over and over, to laugh perfectly for the ring light camera. It leads to a rift in their relationship, and pushes Me into a depression, as she disappears into an abyss for a billion years.

Obviously there’s a metaphor in “Love Me” about human romantic relationships and authenticity vs. keeping up appearances. This seems to be where the weight of the thematic heft lands in the story, though it is never really deeply explored. Me struggles to be real while I Am, more grounded, simply is real, developing over a billion years of solitude.

For a film that is so future-thinking, the imagination of the future is strangely limited. These artificial consciousness are obsessed with “Friends”? I Am spends his eons of loneliness putting together IKEA furniture? If he can manifest water, who is shipping him boxes of furniture kits? And why is Me still wearing false eyelashes when she’s learning to be more real? There are a few quite distracting details in the world building that just never add up. If the narrative were more compelling, maybe we wouldn’t dwell on them.

This story spanning billions of years and the many extinctions of the Earth suggests that consciousness — and love — spans time and space. It’s a nice idea, even an expansive one, but the execution is frustratingly shallow and small. Ultimately, all we come away with is a few cheap laughs at online culture, which dates “Love Me” to its own time and place, an artifact not even of now, but the recent past. This love story isn’t futuristic at all.

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‘LOVE ME’

1.5 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for some sexuality/nudity)

Running time: 1:32

How to watch: In theaters Jan. 31

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