The new film from director Madeleine Rotzler, O Horizon, explores the evolving place of artificial intelligence in our society and the impact it has on our relationships with technology and our emotions.
I could tell from the first few minutes of O Horizon , the new film from director Madeleine Rotzler, that sci-fi in general will need to reckon with the evolving place of artificial intelligence in our society.
AI has been explored in movies for decades – some of those movies have even played an important role in shaping our relationship to the idea of this technology. Representations of it vary wildly, as do the thematic questions it's used to explore. But our response to those representations was very different when the average audience member's default conception of AI was HAL 9000 or Skynet, rather than one of several chatbots accessible from their phones.
I have not revisited Spike Jonze's Her since the launch of ChatGPT, but my reaction to O Horizon, which reminded me of it in several ways, tells me it would play very differently today. The near-future Rotzler builds is only a gentle step or two ahead of ours, but that very closeness makes the casual acceptance of its tech harder to buy.
When faced with the film's premise, I instinctively dwelled on several, distrusting questions that O Horizon hardly even thinks to ask. This isn't the movie's only limitation, but it may be the biggest. Though it plays with some interesting ideas and features a moving lead performance from Maria Bakalova, O Horizon ultimately handles its heavy themes with too light a touch. A greater sense of curiosity, or at least more energy, could have made for a more lingering experience.
As it is, though, this film feels a good degree smaller than what it tries to engage with. O Horizon's Sci-Fi Premise Goes Down A Little Too Easy When we meet her, Abby (Bakalova) is in an emotional rut. Her father (David Strathairn) died a few months ago, and though she's starting to feel the pressure to move on, she's as weighed down by his loss as she was when it happened.
The prospect of returning home for the weekend to see her mother (Paulina Porizkova) and brother (Nicholas Podany), the first time since his passing, gives her anxiety. Abby's a neuroscientist whose work on a cutting-edge project is about to pay off after a decade, and right at the critical moment, her head isn't in the game. So, she pursues an unorthodox solution. After seeing an ad for the Make a Friend store, she diverts her journey home and wanders in.
There, along with many parody movie posters advertising the store, she finds Sam (Adam Pally), who is a little more desperate to make the sale than Abby seems to notice. He offers a pretty remarkable service: Using the raw materials they've left behind, such as emails, videos, and text messages, Make a Friend's AI algorithm can recreate anyone. Just subscribe to the app, feed it the material, and you'll be able to call them whenever you like.
O Horizon is filled with various forms of seductive simulacra that lead us away from tangible reality in ways that may not be helpful. Not everyone has used it the way Abby intends to – Sam humorously recalls how awkward it was for him, as a Jewish man, to have made Hitler for a client. But he insists the recreations are as accurate as it gets. The possibility of actually speaking to her dad again is too much to resist.
This concept is not new, nor purely fictional. You could create a bot of a dead loved one today, if you wanted. Doing so might inspire a range of concerns related to this AI creation not being real, but O Horizon isn't really all that concerned with that. Abby reacts with the full emotional catharsis of having the person she missed most back in her life, which is understandable.
Some other characters are worried that this is unhealthy and that she's chosen not to move on, but the bot itself isn't subjected to much scrutiny. The movie proceeds as if this David Strathairn's voice on the other end of the phone is indeed a perfect recreation of Abby's father. O Horizon's Direction Is A Conscious Choice, But A Limiting One In fairness to Rotzler, ignoring this problem is what allows her film to tackle what she's really after.
O Horizon is filled with various forms of seductive simulacra that lead us away from tangible reality in ways that may not be helpful. The study Abby's working on, which she's conducting on a monkey named Dorey, has been mapping brain activity in the hopes of eventually synthesizing experiences. Someone aiming to lose weight, for example, could actually experience fullness rather than endure hunger. In this movie's optimistic world, the possibilities to improve human life are endless.
But chasing artificial stopgaps to our problems could discourage us from actually solving those problems. Learning how to deal with the pain of hunger, or of grief in Abby's case, is how we actually grow as people. Easing the pain with technology, however effective, only ensures that we don't have to change. This manifests in Abby's relationship with her AI father in intriguing ways.
He is far from the sycophantic chatbots we're used to now. The movie proceeds as if this David Strathairn's voice on the other end of the phone is indeed a perfect recreation of Abby's father. O Horizon's direction is a conscious choice, but a limiting one
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