Artificial companion films work better in pairs. Watched alone, each one feels like a gimmick with a thesis attached; watched two at a time, they start answering each other. Here are four pairings, one per evening, drawn from nearly a century of the genre, plus one title to leave on the shelf.
Start where it started: Metropolis and Bride of Frankenstein. The robot Maria of 1927 is cinema's first artificial woman, built to impersonate a saint and wreck a city, and audiences have been uneasy about gynoids ever since. Eight years later the Bride arrives as the first companion literally made to order, and the joke history remembers is that she takes one look at her intended and screams. Between them, the two films set the genre's poles early: the artificial woman as deception, and the artificial woman as refusal. Everything since is a footnote wearing better effects.
Night two, the pleasure models: Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence. Ridley Scott's replicants include Pris, introduced flatly as a pleasure model, and Rachael, who doesn't know she's a product at all; between the two of them the film covers most of what there is to say about manufactured desire and planned obsolescence. Oshii's Innocence picks up the thread in animation, opening on companion gynoids that have begun killing their owners and spiraling into the strangest, most beautiful meditation on dolls ever put on screen. Neither film flatters the viewer. Watch them back to back and the neon starts to look like a warning light.
Night three is the gentle one: Robot & Frank and After Yang. In the first, an aging burglar with a failing memory gets a care robot and teaches it to steal, and the machine's parting offer, that Frank should erase its memory to protect himself, is one of the kindest gestures in science fiction. After Yang mourns a family android by going through what he noticed while he ran: a few seconds of tea, a face in the sun, small things saved carefully. Neither film has a romance in it and both are about love. This is the pairing to show anyone who thinks the genre belongs to lonely men.
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