This review is part of our coverage of the 2020 Austin Polish Film Festival. I AM REN streams for free from Nov. 29 - Dec. 5 — click here to watch the film and check out the rest of the lineup!

About five minutes into this coldly precise film, we get the only shot of the film (to my eye, and excluding effects on various in-world screens) with effects not accomplished in-camera. The camera moves slowly towards Ren, a Parent With A Problem, and we see undulating striations criss-crossing just beneath the skin of her back. Is it still body horror if the body belongs to an android? Turns out, much of the movie seeks to answer the multitudes contained within and around this question.

As we soar ever closer to our impending date with human-like Artificial Intelligence, the popular storytelling apparatuses we have at our disposal produce more and more tales of this nature: the Prometheus films, Westworld, Raised By Wolves, Her, Alita: Battle Angel… Our creations turned inevitable overlords take many shapes: they might just be a bud in the ear of Joaquin Phoenix or they might be fully imbued with gore and bodily fluids just like the rest of us meatsacks, but in this type of story they always raise a common question: what constitutes humanity, and where lies the moral high ground?

I Am Ren benefits early on from carving details from the granite of the specific, placing Ren in plush, high-necked sweaters and scarves that go on for days. We may have a similar cool industrial color palette punctuated with bright red screen readouts to what we see in Ex Machina, but this environment is cold. I kept thinking about robots clad in cold-weather gear throughout this movie, and there are dozens of other small details that humanize Ren to her human viewers. Fragments of carefully orchestrated and intimately believable familial bliss open the film; Ren and her son Kam play a coloring game about dinosaurs, those two plus Kam’s father Jan grill sausages over a fire by their lakeside home, Ren surprises Jan with a fish lure earring while he is perched on the pier fishing.

We’re quickly initiated into the big questions here, though, when Ren sits through a commercial hawking other models like her, the voiceover promising that they are “Made according to your needs. Made according to your dreams.” All of the home’s appliances are apparently connected to her, the lights and microwave and sinks, in some juiced up and inevitable progression of Alexa.

One innovation here is placing the android at the center of the story, forcing the viewer’s empathy and allegiance to align with Ren rather than with any of the human characters. All the questions of truth and “humanity”, of course, feel more pressing and potent when they are concerning our avatar rather than a villain or plot device.

The plot spirals us down into a fever dream of manipulation, barely-masked terror, seeming abuse and paranoia. There is an Event that we see referenced again and again in half-remembered and obscured flashes, wherein the son Kam seems to have been beaten by either Ren or Jan… it’s difficult to determine as we are whipped back and forth along an uncertain timeline à la Bernard Lowe in Westworld. Is Ren remembering events correctly? Is Jan really feeding her therapy bullet points to recite in their session, or is it in her head? Are her high-heeled shoes really slipping and struggling for purchase on the brink of a seriously sinister case of stairs, or is Jan just hugging her there in the doorway? As we see this world through her eyes, Jan in particular swings so wildly and rapidly from tender to unhinged that the obvious conclusion to us, the Ren-bonded, is that he must be gaslighting her to a truly reality-warping extent. But what can we be sure of, as the story guides us through its version of the Is It Real labyrinth? Some 12 Monkeys, Shutter Island, Moon types of beats start entering here.

The stakes in the film are often nebulous and hard to pin down, but they often are in relationships too, right? Obviously this is not always the case, but sometimes the ties that bond two (or more) people together are visions of what and who we want, emotional ties that we’ve made the decision to build up, and very real but nevertheless arbitrary expectations. I suppose that in the end, once you sort through the noise, there is the bedrock stake of needing to know yourself and to know that you can trust the world around you. I Am Ren makes a strong case that, whether you’re an android artificially made by human hand or a human artificially made by a hand further up the chain of existence, holding the keys to your own truth is critical to survival.

Stray thoughts

Putting out a cigarette on the barcode on her foot!
Ren is an expensive piece of hardware! It’s an important reminder of class and access in a movie mostly focused on other questions.
There are a few moments of anxiety-apex, buzzy David Lynch sounds; is the film making a bid for the lexicon of sights and sounds of robot body horror?

Austin Polish Film Festival 2020: I AM REN / JESTEM REN