From Omeleto.
A man gets an A.I. girlfriend.
IN THE FLESH is used with permission from Jack Kuhlenschmidt. Learn more at https://instagram.com/thatkuhlguy.
Jay is a tech company co-founder whose ex-girlfriend, Alison, has moved on. She’s now dating a prominent politician running for office, while he’s still struggling with depression.
He turns to an experimental A.I. girlfriend based on Alison, but whose settings are adjustable by Jay. She’s his dream girlfriend, everything he wishes Alison could have been. But when she’s all too true to her programming, the fantasy turns out to be too good to be true.
Directed and written by Jack Kuhlenschmidt, this taut sci-fi thriller is reminiscent at first of the sexy, dark and grown-up thrillers of the 80s and early 90s like FATAL ATTRACTION or 9 1/2 WEEKS, when desires intersected with other agendas in cat-and-mouse games of dominance and revenge. Like those noir-like films, a troubled protagonist seeks appeasement or comfort through shadowy means, only for those means to backfire and create havoc.
Shot with shadowy cinematography reflecting Jay’s cloistered emotional climate, the storytelling starts with Jay, depressed and phoning it in at work, much to his co-founder’s subtle annoyance. Instead, he’s preoccupied with a device he’s obtained from the unsavory corners of the Internet — an A.I. substitute for his ex. But unlike his unruly, unreasonable ex-girlfriend, this version can be adjusted to his liking, and Jay can control settings like her emotional openness or level of aggression.
Much of the gripping storytelling’s fascination derives at first from watching Jay adjust Alison to fit whatever he wants in the moment, and as Alison, actor Samantha Robinson offers a deft, precise performance, calibrating Alison with a finely tuned balance of slightly artificial emotion and genuine intrigue. As Jay, actor Logan Miller slowly peels back Jay’s depressed exterior, revealing a core of arrogance and anger at his ex and her new boyfriend. But despite the veneer of control he exerts over his A.I. lover, she proves wilier and more powerful than he expected, harnessing his rage towards a dangerous target. As they barrel towards the endgame of this game of control and manipulation, Jay finds himself on a dangerous course of action.
Dark, intriguing and tense, IN THE FLESH takes a slightly unexpected direction towards its end, withholding what we imagine as a final confrontation to reveal a larger, even more nefarious design that evokes the great conspiracy thrillers of Alan J. Pakula or Costa-Gavras. It ends with thought-provoking questions of how susceptible we can be to A.I. emotionally and how manipulated the lost and broken are. It’s a relevant question, considering a growing spate of cases like one in 2021, when a British man was arrested for breaking into Windsor Castle and threatening to kill the Queen, encouraged by an A.I.-powered chatbot he created online. It aims to cast a looming shadow of inquiry in its viewers’ minds and succeeds in doing so admirably.
