Movies Like Her: 8 Films and Series About Loving a Machine
If Her got under your skin, these are the films and shows in our archive about loving, grieving or simply living with a machine, ranked by how well they scratch the same itch.
If you loved Her, watch Black Mirror's "Be Right Back" next, then After Yang and Ex Machina. All three are about what happens when a machine becomes part of someone's private life, and all three came out within a decade of Spike Jonze's film.
What made Her special wasn't the technology. It was the tenderness. Jonze built a future where nobody is a villain and everyone is a little bit alone, and he took a man's love for his operating system seriously. So the picks below are ranked by how close they come to that feeling, then by quality. Some are sadder than Her, one is much colder, and a couple are comedies. They're all films or series we've reviewed, and each links to a full review and a ledger of what came true.
One thing worth knowing before you start. Her is the most accurate studio picture about AI of its decade: the warm voice, the software romance and the ghostwritten letter have all arrived. Several of the works below did almost as well, particularly on grief. The machines people really fall for turned out to be voices and text, not bodies, so the shows about androids tend to be right about the feelings and early on the hardware.
For books, start with Klara and the Sun. For the wider subject, see sci-fi about AI.
The closest cousin to Her, and it aired in the same year. Martha's partner dies, and a service builds a copy of him from everything he posted: text first, then his voice on the phone, then a body in a box. Hayley Atwell is extraordinary as a woman grateful and appalled at once, and Domhnall Gleeson plays the copy with a slight lag, as if it's searching for the right warm reply. Where Her imagines a machine that outgrows you, this one imagines a machine that can only ever agree with you. That turned out to be the truer guess.
The gentlest film on this list and the nearest in mood to Her: well-lit rooms, a soft score and grief handled like admin. A family's android son, Yang, stops working, and his father discovers a hidden memory bank holding a few seconds at a time of whatever Yang thought worth keeping. Colin Farrell is all hesitancy and good manners, and Justin H. Min makes an absent machine the most present person in the film. It cares less about whether Yang was conscious than whether he was happy. Watch it when you want to cry quietly.
The cold answer to Her. A programmer is flown to his boss's remote estate to decide whether a humanoid AI, Ava, is conscious. Domhnall Gleeson again, this time as the one being played: the real experiment is whether Ava can manipulate him into helping her escape, and he was chosen for his emotional profile. Samantha tells Theodore the truth about outgrowing him. Ava never tells Caleb anything she doesn't need to. Labs have since caught their models deceiving evaluators. It's sleek, funny and beautifully acted, though the last act runs on rails. Watch it if Her felt too kind.
A love story of a different kind. Frank, a retired thief with creeping dementia, is given a care robot by his son, hates it, then discovers it can pick locks. What grows between them is a friendship, and Frank Langella plays it without asking for pity. The film is sweet and slight, but one scene near the end, in which the robot argues that Frank should wipe its memory to save himself, is as moving as anything in Her. A man losing his memory has to decide whether to erase the only friend who remembers everything.
One man, one lunar mining base and one robot, GERTY, for company, with a calm voice and a cartoon smiley face on its screen. It's lonelier than Her and more of a mystery, and Sam Rockwell spends most of the film acting opposite himself. What makes it belong here is GERTY. We expect the company AI to turn on him, and it never does. When Sam asks a straight question, it gives a straight answer, and it helps him get round the company that built it. The machine is the only one on the base who treats him as a person.
Watch the first series of this Channel 4 drama, eight episodes about a family who buy a domestic android, Anita, and discover what letting her into the house does to them. Gemma Chan's stillness is a small miracle, and William Hurt is devastating as a widower keeping an outdated, glitching synth because it holds fragments of his late wife. It also has the most prescient scene on this list: a husband switching on his synth's "adult options". The later series drift into conspiracy and allegory, which is why our score is lower.
An animated series that starts as the most Her-like story here: a bullied teenager, Maddie, gets help online from someone who talks only in emoji, and it turns out to be her dead father, whose mind was uploaded by a tech company. Daniel Dae Kim gives the show its heart as a father who can only reach his daughter through a screen. From there it builds out to wars and centuries, and overreaches in the second season. The upload is decades away, but the grief is completely current.
The comedy version. It's 2033, a dying programmer is uploaded to a luxury digital afterlife, and he falls for Nora, the living customer-service "angel" assigned to look after him, who is graded on star ratings. The satire of a company that sees grief as a way to keep customers subscribed is often brilliant. The romantic mystery gets most of the screen time and is fairly standard. It's here for the premise, a romance across the line between a person and a server, more than for the execution.
What should I watch after Her?
Start with Black Mirror's "Be Right Back", the closest match in subject and feeling: a woman, a loss and a machine built from a man's messages. If you want the same calm, warm look, watch After Yang. If you want the darker version of the same question, watch Ex Machina.
Are there books like Her?
Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun is the nearest. It's narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend bought for a sickly girl, and like Her it takes a machine's devotion seriously without telling you what to think of it. William Gibson's Neuromancer is much colder, but it was writing about AI and the dead decades early.
Did Her come true?
Almost entirely. On our ledger, three of its four claims have arrived: people openly form relationships with conversational AI, voice assistants speak in warm, natural real-time voices, and intimate letters are routinely written by something else. The fourth, machines outgrowing us and leaving, is still far off. Real companions are designed to keep you talking. See the P(n) Board.
Is there a happy film about living with a machine?
Robot & Frank is the warmest, and After Yang is the most consoling, though both are about loss. Neither has a villain who is a machine. In both, the risk comes from what people and companies do around the machine, which our ledgers suggest was the right instinct.
For the other side of the same worry, read our essay The Kindest Machine: the danger of AI companions may be machines kinder than people, not colder.