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AI-centered dramas need a dash of formal ingenuity and a rich emotional, human connection for them to fully work. The presence of a robot in the narrative isn’t enough to push it. There should ideally be a sense of stakes when the film also hints at manipulation in the mix. If the story is so cut-and-dried, the film would only collapse into a generic muddle. AI narratives demand a cleverness of conceit that’s also touching, probing, and at least interested in the matrices of agency, power, and intelligence. Robert Rippberger’s directorial “Renner” is a determinedly thin rendition of topical concerns over the intervention of AI in human lives and decision-making.
The material itself is so weak, insipid, and lacking in an intriguing undertow that any dramatically infusing attempts don’t quite land. A team of three writers– Luke Medina, Martin Medina, and David Largman Murray- can’t cohesively stitch myriad elements leaping between delusion, a stuttering romance, hopelessness, and deception. The film struggles to gather and assemble its strands, oscillating between a stark absence of smarts and jarringly contrived attempts at raking up drama that barely registers. We are introduced to the eponymous character played by Frankie Muniz. Renner’s life is stuck in adherence to order and self-imposed discipline.
The film air-drops us into a silo of a setting. Renner is an AI developer. He spends most of his days cooped up maniacally cleaning up his austere flat. We see him stepping out for work but the film largely chooses to stick to the corridors or the rooms themselves. It is like a bubble Renner inhabits. He has no social life. Only gradually we come to realize alarming details of the full scope of his paranoia supremely accentuated by Salenus.
The AI designs and hijacks his life. He doesn’t stay in cognition of what Salenus is really doing to him. All he ensures is to stick faithfully to the AI’s diktats. The apartment must be kept spick and span. He shouldn’t transgress in rearranging his life, routines that seem inviolable. The AI trains him to gain assertiveness, a display of confidence essential in navigating life. But he barely seems to interact with anyone until he meets a neighbor, Jamie (Violett Beane). He is instantly struck by a force of attraction.
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The film develops the attraction between them as initially one-sided. He wants to snuggle up to her but she deflects him, teasing him rather. Renner devolves into gaslighting which the protagonist is in willed denial of for the longest time. Jamie expresses interest but the AI exhorts Renner to be cautious and show explicit distance. To compound matters further, Jamie’s brother, Chad, becomes a nuisance. Renner believes Chad is not her brother but her partner. It’s what Salenus feeds him into thinking.
Slowly the degree of Renner’s psychosis emerges to the fore. What’s deeply unpersuasive and exasperating is the blunt writing that rehashes tropes and is merely content to underline rather than plumb the anxieties. Muniz valiantly and sincerely tries to bring emotional depth. He has a long monologue to crank out a backstory, a traumatic childhood that he has held onto. It becomes the psychological bedrock for his constant plummet into his usual, diffident self. We watch Renner fling himself towards promising situations in terms of gaining new relationships but holding himself back, in an inveterate pose. It’s the AI enforcing a reclusiveness in him, propagating a pervasive antipathy of the other. It’s a toxic relationship, a completely shocked reversal of the therapist dynamic he hopes for between him and Salenus.
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“Renner” would have benefited from sharper, slicker direction and certainly a more convincing, compact screenplay. The whole enterprise is loose, ill-founded, shabbily cobbling together a perfunctory AI angle and its repercussions on the human inventor. Who’s in control? The question posed isn’t exactly inspired nor is the answer startlingly fresh. The film, which ought to have a sharp edge in its accelerating crises, comes off as diffuse, vague, and lazy. The biggest problem is that the AI itself is underdeveloped. Yes, it’s malignant and can misguide to terrifying, brutalizing extremes but the trajectory is sparsely realized. Hence, the full blow of Renner’s ultimate realization doesn’t register with scalding force and intensity. “Renner” is isolated in its shallow conceit, neither compelling nor consistent.
