Spike Jonze's "Man falls in love with Siri" movie gets a synopsis and a title

So before people start dusting off the ol’ Sex Offender’s Roll let’s just clarify that that reads “SIRI”, the iPhone voice activated personal assistant, not “SURI”, Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’ 6-year old daughter who’s allergic to smiling.

Not that a guy falling in love with an iPhone app is any less weird, mind you.  But this is celebrated director Spike Jonze with a cast led by Jaoquin Phoenix that we’re talking about here, so we had faith that this could turn out cool. Turns out we were right. But also wrong.

Indiewire broke out the magnifying glass and hunting hat and did some snooping around on the Annapurna Pictures website, and was rewarded for their borderline obsessive behaviour with a synopsis that tells us that the whole “Siri” angle may have been misrepresented a tad.

“In the not so distant future, Theodore (Joaquin Phoenix), a lonely writer purchases a newly developed operating system designed to meet the user’s every needs. To Theodore’s surprise, a romantic relationship develops between him and his operating system. This unconventional love story blends science fiction and romance in a sweet tale that explores the nature of love and the ways that technology isolates and connects us all.”

So not a “Man falls in love with an iPhone app” story after all, but rather a legitimate science-fiction tale about how humans can fall in love with a proper artificial intelligence? Yeah, I can dig it.

Also discovered in Annapurna’s cyber domain by The Film Stage was the title of the film, which will simply be Her. The single pronoun is certainly intriguing, and I’d be hazarding a guess that this AI can take various female forms based on the fact that Jonez has assembled a bevy of beauties to co-star with Phoenix: Rooney Mara, Amy Adams, Samantha Morton, and Olivia Wilde.

Yeah, if my OS looked like Olivia Wilde, not only would I completely understand falling in love with it, but I’m pretty sure that mkostttt oif mmmy aartticle3s weoul;d ;lo0ok liik3 tghiss be3cAUse ogf STIc ky k3eys.

With an auteur like Jonze (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Where the Wild Things Are) at the helm, you can be sure that this will be heading into some rather unique and memorable territory. Well, for us at least. Nestled in among the what seems like hundreds of short films and documentaries that Jonez has done in between his feature film projects, is a 2010 short, I’m Here, in which he already blended elements of science fiction and romance pretty well:

Last Updated: September 4, 2012