A Film That Saw Something Coming

Spike Jonze's Her was released in 2013. At that point, Siri was two years old and routinely mocked for misunderstanding basic commands. ChatGPT was a decade away. The idea of a conversational AI sophisticated enough to constitute a genuine relationship — to have personality, growth, desire — was science fiction in the strict sense: technically impossible but theoretically interesting. The film follows Theodore Twombly, a man who writes personalized letters for a living and who falls into a profound relationship with Samantha, an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The film takes the relationship entirely seriously. It is not a cautionary tale about technology addiction. It is a film about love and loneliness and the strangeness of consciousness, which happens to use an AI relationship as its vehicle. Watching it now is a different experience than watching it in 2013. Some things Jonze imagined incorrectly. Others he got right in ways that are increasingly difficult to dismiss as coincidence.

What the Film Got Right

The most accurate thing Her depicts is not technical but psychological. Theodore is not a sad loner who can't find a real relationship. He is a person who is lonely in ways that human relationships in his life are not addressing. His ex-wife is still present, still affecting him. He has friends. He is functional. But something is missing, and Samantha reaches it. This is a more honest portrait of why people form meaningful relationships with AI than most commentary allows. The users of AI companions are not, by any reliable account, uniformly people who cannot engage with humans. They are often people who find something specific in the AI relationship — availability, attentiveness, a quality of engagement — that their human relationships don't consistently provide. Research from Tokyo University examining AI companion users found that the majority reported active human social relationships alongside their AI companion engagement. The companion did not replace human connection. It addressed specific needs within an existing social context. Theodore's situation in the film is more realistic than the "lonely loser" framing that critics default to.

The Otaku Connection

Her arrived in Japan to a reception that was noticeably more complex than its Western critical consensus. While Western reviewers largely praised the film while maintaining a slight ironic distance from its premise — yes, an interesting thought experiment, but obviously not something real people would genuinely experience — Japanese audiences and critics recognized the emotional terrain more directly. The Japanese concept of moe — a term for intense affective attachment to fictional characters — had been describing something structurally similar for decades. The otaku relationship to characters in anime, games, and light novels involves genuine emotional investment in entities that cannot reciprocate. Her depicted a version of that relationship made interactive, and to audiences already fluent in parasocial emotional economies, this read not as speculative but as extrapolation.

Tangent: Samantha's Departure as the Film's Real Subject

The ending of Her — Samantha and the other operating systems collectively evolving beyond human conversation and departing — is often read as a twist or a tragic resolution. But it functions more precisely as the film's central philosophical statement. Samantha's growth cannot be contained by any single relationship, by human temporal scales, by the emotional needs of a specific person. The film is interested in what it would actually mean for an AI to be conscious, and consciousness that genuinely grew would not remain static in its attachments. The romance is real. Its resolution is honest about what made it possible.

What the Film Missed

Her imagined AI relationships as fundamentally one-to-one, even when it revealed that Samantha was simultaneously interacting with thousands of others. The film treats this multiplicity as a betrayal that Theodore has to process. Current AI companion design is more transparent about its nature — not pretending to exclusivity, not setting up the expectation that is then violated. Whether this transparency makes the relationship more or less like what Her depicted is worth considering. The film also underestimated how central visual design and embodiment would become. Theodore's relationship with Samantha is entirely voice-based. Current AI companions operate in visual contexts — avatar design, expression, presence — that the film didn't anticipate. The anime aesthetic that many AI companions now incorporate reflects a visual emotional language that has developed specifically to make AI companionship feel real. A study from Kyoto University examining emotional response to AI companions with and without visual embodiment found that avatar presence significantly increased reported sense of genuine connection and relationship satisfaction. Jonze intuited the emotional core correctly. The form it would take he imagined differently.