Love Me Kristen Stewart Steven Yeun Film Review

There’s whimsy and poignancy in “Love Me”‘s central conceit: Millions of years after human beings are gone from the earth, a buoy falls in love with a satellite. Reminiscent of “WALL-E,” with shades of last year’s beautiful “The Wild Robot,” “Love Me” shows an uninhabited Earth, where the only “consciousness” remaining is the bleeping sounds of machines attempting to connect, without even knowing why at first. Co-directors Sam and Andy Zuchero also wrote the script, and while there are a lot of vibrant ideas at play, there are about ten ideas too many. The film ponders existential questions but keeps them at a remove. The time span is vast, but the concerns are commonplace.

“Love Me” starts with a stunning sped-up montage of the creation of Earth billions of years ago, with the human race’s “run” on the planet going by in a flash (and ending in a nuclear flash). Millions more years pass, and ice coats the empty planet. Millions more years pass, and the ice melts, and a formerly-frozen buoy suddenly bobs in the water, its one big eye opening. It’s a cross between C-3PO and R2-D2. The buoy puts out a signal, like a message on a dating app: “Smart Buoy waiting to connect.” A satellite careening by overhead answers the call with its pre-recorded message, presumably for the alien race who might end up there: “Welcome to Earth!”

Communication is tough. They have no context or consciousness. The satellite remains fully loaded with the entirety of human history as contained in the Internet, so the buoy and satellite start scrolling through all of it, gleaning what they can from the lost race of humans. Imagine having to learn everything about the human race by watching YouTube videos. This is the initial premise of “Love Me,” and it has so much satirical potential. Unfortunately, “Love Me” has no interest in satire.

The buoy and the satellite discover a YouTube channel run by an impossibly happy couple, blonde influencer Deja (Kristen Stewart) and her boyfriend sidekick Liam (Steven Yeun). This channel gives the two machines the structure they need to form their “personalities.” Deja and Liam do everything together: they wear animal onesies, they eat ice cream, they watch Friends re-runs on “Date Nights,” etc. Stewart and Yeun have a lot of fun recreating the brittle performative mania of YouTube vlogging couples. The tone is just right.

Using this tremendously phony material as a basis, the buoy and satellite work to re-create Deja and Liam. They have no frame of reference other than what they see on YouTube, and they are confused as to why none of it is fun for them. It makes no sense to laugh when you don’t feel like laughing. It makes no sense to pretend to like to do something. The buoy and the satellite have to learn how to “be themselves”, which means breaking free from the YouTube conventions and discover what matters to them as individuals. When “Love Me” starts being a relationship drama it really loses steam (and it was already struggling). Deja and Liam’s problems are generic and have no real resonance. Deja is uptight and needy. Liam needs space and finds his bliss by building some furniture. Good for him, I guess. But it’s hard to care about a man embracing a new hobby while the planet is a dry husk hurtling through space.

Who is “Love Me” for, exactly? It’s not a good sign that I asked myself this as I watched. There are intriguing concepts at play and mesmerizing visuals, but the film feels a little tongue-tied. The message, as far as one can be parsed, seems appropriate for tweens who just got their first phones: Don’t believe everything you see on social media! Instagram photos have filters. YouTube couples fight like crazy behind the scenes. Beware FOMO! This is fine for talking to your kids in 2025, but when your film opens 5 billion years ago, the focus is a little weird and narrow. “Love Me” manages to be both operatic and banal.

Other issues get at the more persistent problem of what the film is actually trying to say. In “The Wild Robot,” Roz the robot has no idea how scary she is to the animals she encounters. She keeps trying to help because that’s what she is programmed to do. The set-up has a beautiful logic, and “Wild Robot” finds the humor in all of it. Care was given to each beat, and the cumulative effect is overwhelming. In “Love Me,” despite the undeniable creativity of the filmmakers, things unravel fairly quickly. As Deja and Liam struggle to live authentic lives outside the YouTube formula, you are left with way too much time to think things like: “If I were trying to learn about the human race from the Internet, I’d have to wade through mountains of cat videos and porn before I could find anything useful.”

There’s a much funnier much darker movie lurking in “Love Me”. Sometimes you almost get a glimpse of it, but it’s gone in a flash.

Sheila O'Malley

Sheila O’Malley received a BFA in Theatre from the University of Rhode Island and a Master’s in Acting from the Actors Studio MFA Program. Read her answers to our Movie Love Questionnaire here.

Love Me

Drama
star rating star rating
92 minutes R 2025

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