It takes only a short amount of viewing time to realize that Spike Jonze’s Her is more than just a movie. From its earliest moments to its blisteringly beautiful, impossibly clear-eyed conclusion, Her is a piercingly raw artistic confessional, a film that takes a seemingly outlandish science-fiction concept at face value to lay bare some of the greatest complexities of the human spirit.
In telling the story of Theodore Twombly, a lonely and brokenhearted man who falls in love with his artificially intelligent operating system, Jonze refuses to take any of the subjects he raises easy, never oversimplifying or selling short, and constantly presenting something so much more thoughtful and nuanced and creative than expectation would dictate.
It is arguable that no performance this year was as excellent as Joaquin Phoenix’s passionate and naturalistic work in the lead role, while the impression Scarlett Johansson leaves in her stunning voice-over work is unshakable. At once both a story about the pain that comes when romance ends and a study of the contrast between the world we inhabit and worlds beyond our understanding – between the tangible boundaries of sight and the far-reaching marvels of human perception and emotion – Her is dense, rich, and layered to the awe-inspiring degrees we expect of cinematic masterworks.
