Algorithms routinely select movies, TV shows, and ads for you, picking up cues from the millions of tiny data crumbs you (and a multitude of others in your demographic) mindlessly strew around every day. How would an algorithm pick an ideal romantic partner? Maria Schrader’s I’m Your Man takes on this question in a bittersweet, witty way. Like the consumer choices offered to us by artificial intelligence, the AI-driven romance in this movie can feel boringly on the nose or just a little bizarre, like a TV app matching Waiting to Exhale with a Dardenne brothers film. That is, until it pulls on your heartstrings with the power of a classic rom-com. 

Working on an archaeological project at Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, commitment-phobe and bluestocking Alma (Maren Eggert) is pushed by her boss into a pilot program matching robots with humans. Her protests that she wants no part of the experiment are smoothly overridden. Alma has been bigfooted into the testing primarily because she’s single. And maybe because she’s a bit of a challenge. Smart and independent but rawboned and slapdash, Alma might be a tough sell to an average man. Perhaps wooing Alma is a job best suited for an android. 

Schrader’s staging of Alma’s first meeting with the robot is a hoot. A representative for the experiment (????Toni Erdmann’s Sandra Hüller) escorts Alma to a red-draped room where couples (some of them holograms) whirl to a band wailing away on woozy saxophones. Tom (Dan Stevens) is handsome, but his eyes stay cold and eerily unblinking, his dancing somehow manages to be both weirdly flamboyant yet rigid, and he undergoes a glitch where he repeats, “Ich bin…ich bin…ich bin,” endlessly until being whisked away by a technical crew.

After this unpromising start, Tom drags a little wheelie suitcase to Alma’s apartment to test their compatibility. He cleans Alma’s messy apartment and draws her a rose-petal bath—romantic gestures she angrily rejects. They feel too programmed and, one suspects, not special enough: Aren’t they based on data hived from other heterosexual women? “Fuck the pedestrian sexual fantasies of your 17 million mind-files!” she later rages.

Tom further arouses Alma’s ire by reciting nerdy safety statistics and keeping an unflappable cool. While Alma is emotional and volatile, Tom always remains watchful and contained. His calm irritates Alma, but Tom has his uses: it’s good to have him around when Alma’s feckless former lover turns up, and his tech skills become indispensable for a late-night break-in at the Pergamon (“I am a computer. The lock system is a computer. Sometimes we help each other out,” he explains).

At a deeper level, Alma and Tom learn to test each other’s limits and stick up for each other. From her supposedly superior position as a human, Alma finds it hard to treat robot Tom as anything more than a second-class citizen incapable of real attachment. But is he more than that?

Eggert’s performance won her the Best Acting Performance award at the Berlin Film Festival, and she convincingly portrays a woman under pressure at work, fed up with her daily routine, and both intrigued by and dismissive of her wired swain. The script can venture into windy philosophical reflections, but Eggert makes these passages relatable by seeming truly absorbed in them. Stevens ably plays off her character’s agitation with a more subtle turn as a watchful android adjusting, computing, and processing mysterious data to win Alma’s love. The two make a strong team. A wistful scene of heartbreak between them observed from far away may end up breaking your own heart. 

Clever and insightful as it is, the film forbears from answering the questions it raises outright. After depicting the two struggling in their own ways to understand each other, I’m Your Man wisely leaves it open where their future will lie. Some things even the most data-intensive AI can’t predict—yet.