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Disembodied, but, Oh, What a Voice

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By Manohla Dargis

Dec. 17, 2013

She sounds like the girl next door — young, friendly, eager. For Theodore Twombly (Joaquin Phoenix), the poetically melancholic hero in “Her,” Spike Jonze’s exquisite new movie, that voice (Scarlett Johansson) is a lifeline to the world, which he has loosened his hold on since separating from his wife. The voice brightly greets him in the morning and, with a sexy huskiness, bids him good night in the evening. The voice organizes his files, gets him out of the house and, unlike some multitasking females, doesn’t complain about juggling her many roles as his assistant, comfort, turn-on, helpmate and savior — which makes her an ideal companion even if she’s also just software.

At once a brilliant conceptual gag and a deeply sincere romance, “Her” is the unlikely yet completely plausible love story about a man, who sometimes resembles a machine, and an operating system, who very much suggests a living woman. It’s set, somehow of course, in Los Angeles, that city of plastic fears and dreams, in an unspecified time in the future. The machines haven’t risen, as they have in dystopian tales like “The Terminator” series, but instead have been folded into everyday life. Theodore learns about the operating system from an advertisement and is soon running it on his home computer and phone. Before long, he and the software, which calls itself Samantha, are exchanging pleasantries, playing the roles of strangers fated to become lovers.

It’s a perfect tale for Mr. Jonze, a fabulist whose sense of the absurd informs his more broadly comic endeavors (notably his work on the “Jackass” movies, including “Bad Grandpa”) and the straighter if still kinked art-house films he’s directed, like “Being John Malkovich” and “Adaptation.” If it has taken time for the depth of Mr. Jonze’s talents to be recognized, it’s partly because of all the attention bestowed on Charlie Kaufman’s scripts for “Adaptation” and “John Malkovich,” which announce their auteurist aspirations on the page. It’s perhaps unsurprising that Mr. Jonze’s third feature, “Where the Wild Things Are,” an emotionally delicate live-action adaptation of that Maurice Sendak book, was a visual knockout with a minimalist story and relatively little dialogue.

Written by Mr. Jonze, “Her” features plenty of talk and comparably little action partly because it’s a neo-classic boy-meets-operating-system romance and only one of them has a body. This is a minor setback as far as the characters are concerned, although only Samantha frets about it. If this profound existential difference doesn’t worry Theodore, it’s because isolation is his default state. That’s both because of his own life-historical events, including his separation from his wife, Catherine (Rooney Mara), and because everyone around him seems more plugged in to their machines than to other people. He has one friend, Amy (Amy Adams), who lives nearby, and talks to only one colleague (Chris Pratt) in the office where he spends his days writing intimate letters for other people.

In “Her,” everything is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar, like all the voice- and gesture-activated software that Theodore uses at work and at play, as if his era had caught up to today’s prototypes. Mr. Jonze and his superb production designer, K. K. Barrett, haven’t reinvented the world, only modestly embellished ours, as with their reimagining of Los Angeles (a role played by that city and Shanghai, with digital assistance). The city still sprawls to near-infinity, but it’s now as vertical as Manhattan, and everyone travels by train, not car. The trains are a low-key, witty touch (and true science fiction), but they also let you see early on how lonely Theodore is even in a crowd.

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Cast & crew
User reviews

In the near future, a lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with an operating system designed to meet his every need. In the near future, a lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with an operating system designed to meet his every need. In the near future, a lonely writer develops an unlikely relationship with an operating system designed to meet his every need.

Spike Jonze
Joaquin Phoenix
Scarlett Johansson
1.4K User reviews
644 Critic reviews
91 Metascore
83 wins & 186 nominations total

Top cast 91

Letter Writer #1
(as Lynn Adrianna)

Letter Writer #2

Letter Writer #3

Sexy Pregnant TV Star

Chat Room Friend #2

OS1 Commercial Lead

Alien Child
(as Adam Spiegel)

Theodore's Divorce Attorney
Marriage Counselor
(as Dr. Guy Lewis)
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia Samantha Morton was originally the voice of Samantha. She was present on the set with Joaquin Phoenix every day. After the filming wrapped and Spike Jonze started editing the movie, he felt like something was not right. With Morton's blessing, he decided to recast the role and Scarlett Johansson was brought and replaced Morton, re-recording all the dialogue.
Goofs When Theodore is lying in the couch at Amy's house there is a crew member behind Amy in the shadow.

Theodore : Sometimes I think I have felt everything I'm ever gonna feel. And from here on out, I'm not gonna feel anything new. Just lesser versions of what I've already felt.

Crazy credits "Leanne Shapton...... Armpit Sex Drawing"
Connections Featured in The Tonight Show with Jay Leno: Episode #22.51 (2013)
Soundtracks Off You Written by Kim Deal Performed by The Breeders Courtesy of Elektra Entertainment Group and 4AD By arrangement with Warner Music Group Film & TV Licensing and Beggars Group Media Limited

User reviews 1.4K

Apr 16, 2018
Why did Theodore get so upset when he heard Samantha let out a sigh?
January 10, 2014 (United States)
United States
Official Facebook
Official site
Shanghai, China
Annapurna Pictures
Stage 6 Films
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$23,000,000 (estimated)
$25,568,251
Dec 22, 2013
$48,269,269

Technical specs

Runtime 2 hours 6 minutes
Dolby Digital

More to explore

Film Review: ‘Her’

Spike Jonze's fourth feature offers a singular, wryly funny and subtly profound consideration of our relationship to technology.

By Scott Foundas

Scott Foundas

Film Review: ‘Black Mass’ 9 years ago
Film Review: ‘The Runner’ 9 years ago
Film Review: ‘Straight Outta Compton’ 9 years ago

Her Spike Jonze National Board of Review

Move over, HAL 9000. Take a hike, Skynet. After decades of being typecast as an agent of destruction or (at best) the harbinger of dystopian things to come, artificial intelligence gets a romantic lead in “ Her ,” Spike Jonze ’s singular, wryly funny, subtly profound consideration of our relationship to technology — and to each other. A truly 21st-century love story, Jonze’s fourth directorial feature (and first made from his own original screenplay) may not be Middle America’s idea of prime date-night viewing, but its funky, deeply romantic charms should click with the hip urban audiences who embraced Jonze’s earlier work, with some cross-pollination to the sci-fi/fantasy crowd.

Not least among Jonze’s achievements here is his beautifully imagined yet highly plausible vision of a near-future Los Angeles (exact year unspecified), where subways and elevated trains have finally supplanted the automobile, and where a vast urban center crowded with skyscrapers sprawls out from downtown in every direction (a clever amalgam of location shooting in L.A. and Pudong, China). Just a few months after “Elysium” foretold an Angel City beset by enviro-pocalypse and class warfare, Jonze cuts the other way, envisaging a society where green living has triumphed and most of the world’s (or at least America’s) social maladies seem to have been remedied — save, that is, for an epidemic of loneliness.

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This is how we first find Theodore Twombly ( Joaquin Phoenix ), a former alt-weekly writer who now plies his trade as a latter-day Cyrano de Bergerac, penning other people’s love letters as a worker bee for the online service BeautifulHandwrittenLetters.com. (The actual “handwriting” is generated by computer, a lovely metaphor for our lingering analog affections in the digital era). Laid low by a recent separation from his wife (Rooney Mara, seen mostly in staccato flashbacks), the divorce papers all but final, Theodore drifts about in a depressive haze, more adept at channeling strangers’ feelings than his own. Until, that is, he meets Samantha.

Popular on Variety

Heralded as the world’s fist A.I. operating system (“It’s not just an OS — it’s a consciousness”), Samantha (aka OS1) enters Theodore’s life rather by chance, and over time, like so much technology, makes him wonder how he ever lived without it. But then, Samantha is no ordinary OS: It has a voice ( Scarlett Johansson , who replaced Samantha Morton during post-production), an attitude, and a curiosity that seems, well, almost human. And therein lies Jonze’s masterstroke. Whereas the very notion of a man falling in love with a machine would have once seemed the stuff of high fantasy or farce, in “Her” it feels like just the slightest exaggeration of how we live now, in a blur of the real and virtual — “dating” online, texting instead of talking, changing our “status” with the click of a mouse. A generation on from the fugitive android lovers of “Blade Runner,” no one in “Her” has anything to hide.

Lack of physical presence notwithstanding, Samantha at first seems close to the male fantasy of the perfect woman: motherly and nurturing, always capable of giving her undivided attention, and (best of all) requiring nothing in return. But what begins like an arrested adolescent dream soon blossoms into Jonze’s richest and most emotionally mature work to date, burrowing deep into the give and take of relationships, the dawning of middle-aged ennui, and that eternal dilemma shared by both man and machine: the struggle to know one’s own true self.

The courtship scenes between Theodore and Samantha (including a freewheeling day trip to Venice Beach) are among the movie’s most disarming, with Phoenix disappearing as deeply under the skin of Jonze’s wounded, sensitive alter-ego as he did the roiling caged beast of “The Master.” (Shy of Daniel Day-Lewis, he may be the most chameleonic actor in movies today.) But it’s Johansson who pulls off the trickiest feat: She creates a complex, full-bodied character without any body at all. Detached from her lethally curvaceous figure, the actress’ breathy contralto is no less seductive, but it also alights with tenderness and wonder as Samantha, both here on Earth and up there in the Cloud, voraciously devours literature, philosophy and human experience.

Indeed, in Jonze’s radical retelling of the “Pinocchio” story (by way of 1984’s techno-romance “Electric Dreams,”), Samantha’s great existential crisis isn’t that she yearns to be a real, flesh-and-blood human. Rather, it’s her dawning realization that humanity may only be one station on a greater and more fulfilling journey through the cosmos — Kubrick’s Star Child come of age at last. How ever can an average Joe like Theodore hope to compete with that?

Jonze fleshes out Theodore’s world ever so slightly, with Chris Pratt as an affable office manager and Amy Adams as an old college chum and erstwhile paramour. But mostly “Her” is a two-(terabyte?)-hander of bracing intimacy, acutely capturing the feel of an intense affair in which the rest of the world seems to pass by at a distance. And where so many sci-fi movies overburden us with elaborate explanations of the new world order, “Her” keeps things airy and porous, feathering in a few concrete details (a news report mentions an impending merger between India and China) while leaving much to the viewer’s imagination.

Working for the fourth time with production designer KK Barrett and costume designer Casey Storm, Jonze hasn’t just made a movie about how we might love in the years to come, but where we might live (in sleek high-rises decked out in leather, hardwood and modern furniture), what we might wear (beltless wool trousers seem to be all the rage for men) and where we might eat (in pretentious Asian fusion bistros, because some things never change). And through it all, we will still strive — in the words of one of the world’s telecommunications giants — to reach out and touch someone.

Reviewed at Warner Bros. screening room, New York, Oct. 1, 2013. (In New York Film Festival — closer; Rome Film Festival — competing). Running time: 119 MIN.

Production: A Warner Bros. release and presentation of an Annapurna Pictures production. Produced by Megan Ellison, Spike Jonze, Vincent Landay. Executive producers, Daniel Lupi, Natalie Farrey, Chelsea Barnard.
Crew: Directed, written by Spike Jonze. Camera (color), Hoyte Van Hoytema; editors, Eric Zumbrunnen, Jeff Buchanan; music, Arcade Fire; additional music, Owen Pallett; music supervisor, Ren Klyce; production designer, KK Barrett; costume designer, Casey Storm; sound designer, Ren Klyce; casting, Ellen Lewis, Cassandra Kulukundis.
With: Joaquin Phoenix, Amy Adams, Rooney Mara, Olivia Wilde, Chris Pratt, Matt Letscher, Portia Doubleday, Scarlett Johansson.

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Her Reviews

The world that Spike Jonze brings us is absolutely incredible.

Full Review | Aug 13, 2024

…a delicate, rather melancholy film, one that relates to a time when communication is everywhere, but the users of the technology feel more alone than ever…

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 20, 2024

The true worth of Her will be realized when the idea that it is based upon is ultimately achieved. Whenever that happens in the future, people are going to look back at Her in disbelieved awe for foreseeing the future with such disarming precision.

Full Review | Original Score: 5/5 | May 14, 2024

Her is a film that has something to say about evolving relationships in the modern world through a unique relationship between a man and his phone, resulting in a beautiful masterpiece of a film.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Dec 31, 2023

One of the more profound films ever made about loneliness, Spike Jonze's beautiful film has Scarlett Johansson's best performance in a narrative that reinvigorates the need for not just communication but the privilege of listening.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 13, 2023

Computers, like the operating systems in Her, already invoke a never-ending, addictive relationship. I hate it but can’t turn away.

Full Review | Sep 1, 2023

... Jonze is narratively playful and challenging, but his interest as a filmmaker is in the human experience: unresolved emotions, emotional pain, longing, disappointment, and the need for love and affirmation

Full Review | Aug 19, 2023

Jonze's future is both vividly-realized and always rooted in the complexities of the human heart.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

One of the most interesting dystopic visions of cinema. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 5, 2023

For my money, the award-winning performance delivered in Her came from Joaquin Phoenix...

Full Review | Dec 5, 2022

The film mixes raw emotion with colorful art to create a world and characters unlike any other.

Full Review | Original Score: A | Aug 28, 2022

“Her” incorporates a familiar science-fiction concept into what is more or less a love story and relational study.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Aug 21, 2022

At once provocative and fragile, Jonze’s many-layered film leaves us with much to consider about how we love and whom we choose to love, and it leaves us reeling with pleasure over the amazing film he’s made.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Aug 19, 2022

Few films have managed to capture all of the nuance and the hypocrisy of a breakup, much less the agonizing process of putting yourself back together.

Full Review | Original Score: 8/10 | May 17, 2022

A beautiful film that explores the relationship between humans and technology, and the fine line that pulls at each side. Spike Jonze delivers a profound exploration on the evolution of love and oneself. Full review in Spanish

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Feb 18, 2022

Maybe love can take many forms. And maybe tech can ultimately just be a tool when put into perspective; maybe it can help us positively evolve as humans. Exploring our still-in-progress relationship with it at least makes for one helluva film...

Full Review | Jul 28, 2021

With Her, Jonze also proves himself to be a very acute observer of the hypersensitive generation that was raised on the computer.

Full Review | Feb 24, 2021

Anyway, if Jonze's concern is presumably with humanity's future and fate, Samantha is largely a diversion, a gimmick.

Full Review | Feb 12, 2021

An oddball story, but it's not an oddball film. It is ripe with real human emotion and commentary on a generation's reliance on technology at the cost of social interaction.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 1, 2021

Spike Jonze has a brilliant eye for style and inventiveness, taking on a conventional quasi-futuristic narrative and giving it a heart and a philosophical message.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Dec 16, 2020

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