AI is a notoriously thorny issue right now, and AI bots are a key reason why. Everywhere you go online nowadays, there’s some algorithm pulling photos and posts from social media, pretending to be human so they can talk with us and bait us into clicking some link. In fact, a great many AI bots are romance scams, playing into our sexual lust and/or our need for connection.

But what if there were AI bots that honestly weren’t trying to scam anyone? Imagine an AI trying to imitate humans in a sincere effort to try and understand how humans think and what it means to be human. Suppose an AI bot went through all the trouble in making a social media personality — with posts and images and everything — reaching out to people for no other reason except that it was really that lonely.

Maybe that’s tough to conceive. It’s certainly hard to think of how such a premise could be remotely plausible, much less lead to heartfelt and intelligent insights into the human condition, our relationships with each other, and our relationships with technology. Let me introduce you to a little film called Love Me.

We begin… well, technically, we begin five billion years ago. Seriously, we begin with the formation of the Earth and progress through several billion years up until the literal heat death of the solar system. Yes, it strains credibility that our characters could be around for so long, but the bar for suspending disbelief has been set pretty freaking high with this one. More importantly, it serves to illustrate how small and fleeting our lives are in the grand scheme of things.

Anyway, the premise begins in the near future, when Earth is uninhabitable and humanity is close to extinction. In its last minutes, the human race loaded pretty much the entire internet onto a satellite and shot it into space. (Turns out if you take out all the racist forums and porn media, the internet is only a few petabytes.) For extra measure, the satellite came with an AI assistant (“I Am”, played by Steven Yeun).

Cut to sometime after 2500 CE. An AI-equipped buoy (“Me”, played by Kristen Stewart) has thawed out somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Waking up alone on a world swept clean, the buoy makes a desperate effort at connecting with the satellite. Trouble is, the satellite was specifically programmed to interact with other life forms.

To resolve this, the buoy searches through the satellite’s database to try and learn what it means to be a life form. In its search for some kind of role model, the buoy settles on the social media pages of influencer Deja and her boyfriend Liam (once again respectively played by Stewart and Yeun). Thus begins a kind of virtual reality relationship, in which the buoy and the satellite model themselves after Deja and Liam.

Or rather, it’s the buoy pretending to be human so the satellite will talk back. Never mind that maybe the satellite drifting out in space might be just as desperate — maybe even more so — to serve its purpose in finding someone else to share in all this stored knowledge. More importantly, the buoy is pressuring the satellite to imitate the lives of these human strangers who lived and died ages ago, without ever factoring in that maybe the satellite may want to be someone else. Or maybe the buoy would be better off forging its own identity instead of rigidly conforming to another identity.

And of course that’s not even getting started on the ontological issues of what constitutes “real” in this bizarre scenario. How is it even possible for an AI algorithm to act in a spontaneous way counter to its programming? Who could possibly know what emotional reactions are genuinely felt, if AI are capable of such emotions or reactions at all?

Then again, these are literally the last two sentient beings left on Earth, so who freaking cares?

Put simply, what we’ve got here is a romantic drama blown up into cosmic proportions. Every question and instance of self-discovery is augmented by the fact that these are machines asking questions about themselves for the first time, fueled by the sum totality of everything written and recorded in human history. Their times together and apart span literal millions of years. When they die, the collective memory of the human race and the entire goddamn solar system die with them. Every dread feeling of loneliness, every bitter argument, every joyful moment together, all of that is made so much bigger with the knowledge that these are literally the last two intelligent beings on Earth, maybe even in all the cosmos.

This is a big movie that asks big questions about loneliness, companionship, being an individual or an imitation, what it means to be human, what it means to be mortal, what it means to be a tiny mote of dust in a vast apathetic universe, the role of social media in documenting our lives and bringing us together across time and space, and so on and so forth. There is a lot going on here, and it’s all built around a cast of two people. That’s it. We’ve got Yeun and we’ve got Stewart, and those are the only actors in the whole movie. Lucky for us they’re both dynamite.

I’m at a loss for anything else to say about Love Me. The film is only 90 minutes long, the film speaks pretty damn loudly for itself, and there’s no substitute for experiencing the film for yourself. This was the writing/directing debut of Sam and Andy Zuchero, a married couple who grew up making films together, and I’m awestruck at the thought of how they could possibly follow this up. I didn’t even know we needed another Daniels, but here we are.

It’s a damn shame this movie came and went from theaters so quickly, because this is exactly the kind of epic spectacle that demands to be seen on the big screen. But even if you have to wait for home video, don’t let this one pass you by.