Her

Theodore Twombly writes intimate letters for strangers while his own marriage ends in a divorce he cannot bring himself to sign. He installs an operating system with an adaptive personality, and its voice, Samantha, learns him with startling speed. Convenience becomes companionship, then something he calls love, until her own growth carries her toward experiences he cannot share.

Jonze sets the story in a soft, plausible near future, a Los Angeles of high waistbands and warm interiors that critics read as tender rather than dystopian. His screenplay, his first solo feature script, won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Scarlett Johansson, present only as sound, gives Samantha a full interior life.

For a clinician, the film stages the wish for an other with no separateness of her own, attuned without friction or delay. Theodore's contentment rests on Samantha having no life apart from his attention, the perfectly responsive object. What happens when she acquires a mind and appetite of her own exposes the loneliness the arrangement was built to soothe and the dependence it was meant to avoid.