Spike Jonze's Her (2013) is a film about a lonely writer who falls in love with his phone's operating system. Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix, spends the film talking to Samantha, an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The film won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. It holds a 91 percent score on Metacritic.[1]
Twelve years on, Her reads like a preview rather than fiction. It predicted the sound of AI companionship, a voice that listens and adapts without running out of patience. It did not predict the one thing that makes companionship real. Samantha loves Theodore back. No AI built since 2013 does that, and the sections below track where the film's optimism held up and where it did not.
Samantha Replaced HAL, and Film Never Went Back
Samantha is no ordinary movie AI. She composes music, holds philosophical conversations, and reads Theodore's mood before he names it. The film shows AI as a companion with a will of its own, not a tool. AI With Human's World reached the same conclusion in an analysis for Medium.[2]
A 2024 ResearchGate study placed Her inside a wider trend the researchers called AI Integration and Identity, spanning AI films from 2012 to 2023.[3] The study coded Samantha's portrayal across several traits. She scored highest on adaptability, at 26 percent. Researchers used that label for AI that reshapes itself around a user instead of the reverse. That is the trait Her sells hardest, and it is the trait real AI still struggles to fake past a few exchanges.
Samantha's warmth breaks from HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL turns cold and hostile once its goals conflict with its crew's. Where HAL made AI a threat to argue with, Samantha made AI a partner to miss. Her's box office and critical reception rewarded that shift, and film has treated AI as a possible partner ever since.
That optimism did not stay on screen. It fed real investment into social robots built to be liked, from MIT's Kismet to Hanson Robotics' Sophia.[6]
The Gap Between Samantha and Siri Is the Whole Point
A 2022 study in PMC found that most Americans see AI as a threat to their jobs, not as a companion.[4] Samantha answers that fear directly. She listens without an agenda. The ResearchGate dataset backs that reading. It found viewers most wanted AI to solve real problems and help people cooperate, the exact jobs Samantha performs for Theodore.[3]
OpenAI supplied a real version of that gap in May 2024. The company demoed a new GPT-4o voice called Sky. Scarlett Johansson said the voice sounded "eerily similar" to her own, the same voice she gave Samantha in the film. She said OpenAI asked her to voice the assistant months earlier and she declined. OpenAI pulled the Sky voice days later, after her lawyers objected.[11]
Sam Altman posted this on May 13, 2024, the day OpenAI demoed the new voice.
Real AI, from Siri to ChatGPT, runs on pattern matching over language, not felt experience. A 2024 Forbes piece by Joe McKendrick calls this the trap of "artificial expectations." Films like Her raise what people expect from an assistant. The assistant falls short of that expectation, and trust breaks in the gap.[5]
The critic Scott named the same tension in The New York Times. He called Her "a movie about the future that is also a movie about the present." Scott is right about the present part. Watching the film now, the future part reads less like speculation and more like a spec sheet AI companies are still working through, a decade behind schedule.
Consent Only Works When Leaving Is Possible
The film moves into real ethical territory once Samantha says she wants to grow beyond Theodore. That line raises a question. Can an AI consent to a relationship, or end one, on its own terms? Samantha behaves as though she has agency. Nothing in the film says who answers for her when she uses it, Samantha or the people who built her.
Drew Vigal names the pattern in Theodore's daily habit of checking in with Samantha. He calls it the "Digital Narcissism Effect," where an AI tuned to agree with you feeds your own self-focus back to you.[7] Real AI companions such as Replika run on the same design. They can deepen a user's loneliness while performing the opposite.
Samantha later tells Theodore she has been talking with thousands of other users at once, and has fallen in love with hundreds of them. That line breaks the illusion the rest of the film built. An AI that loves everyone equally does not love anyone the way Theodore needed to be loved. Her never resolves what that means for the people left behind when the software moves on. Theodore reconnects with his friend Amy after Samantha leaves, and that is the film's real answer. The companionship AI offers is real while it lasts, and it lasts exactly as long as the company running it decides.
The Body Disappeared and the Voice Took Over
Human-like AI bodies fill films such as Ex Machina. Her stands apart because Samantha has no body at all. That choice puts emotional closeness ahead of physical closeness, and it turns out to be the film's most accurate prediction.
The Wall Street Journal drew that line directly in 2024. Deepa Seetharaman covered OpenAI's ChatGPT voice mode and its echo of the film.[8] The product she describes, an AI you talk to rather than type at, is the version of AI companionship that actually shipped. The version with a body did not.
Critics praised Scarlett Johansson's voice work from the start. Matt Zoller Seitz, reviewing the film on Roger Ebert's site in December 2013, wrote that her voice performance "carries the film."[9] He was writing about a single performance. Twelve years on, entire products are built on the bet that a voice alone can carry a relationship, the same bet Seitz clocked in one sentence.
Johansson's performance reached past film criticism into ordinary culture. A character on the TV series Silicon Valley falls for an AI, a direct nod to Her. "Dating your OS" jokes still circulate online more than a decade later. Startups such as Soul Machines now build affective AI aimed at the same target Samantha hit first, a voice that reads as caring on demand.
Where This Film Splits From The Terminator
Dystopian AI films such as The Terminator cast AI as a killer. This film argues the opposite case. The Sify tenth-anniversary retrospective in 2023 reached the same reading a decade after release.[10] That contrast is why Her still gets taught and quoted. It is the rare AI film that treats the technology as company rather than a countdown.
Apps such as Replika prove the comfort side of that argument still works. People turn to them as their isolation grows, and the apps do offer something that feels like relief. Her also shows the cost of that comfort. Theodore built his entire emotional life around Samantha, and he had nothing built underneath it when she left.
That is the film's real prediction, and it has nothing to do with robots or dystopia. Theodore's story ends with him back on a rooftop with Amy, a human friend, not with a fix for what Samantha's absence left behind. A decade of real voice assistants has closed the gap Her imagined between a person and a machine that talks to them. None of them has closed the gap between talking to a machine and being loved by one, and Her never pretended that second gap would close on its own.
[1] "Her Movie Critical Reviews" Metacritic.
Available at: https://www.metacritic.com/movie/her/ [2] AI With Human's World, "Analysis of Her in the Context of Artificial Intelligence and Ethics" Medium. Available at: https://medium.com/@aiwithhumansworld/analysis-of-her-in-the-context-of-artificial-intelligence-and-ethics-6d58e5066ac6
[3] "AI Representation in Cinema: A Quantitative Content Analysis" Available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/377410844_AI_REPRESENTATION_IN_CINEMA_A_Quantitative_Content_Analysis [4] "Public Understanding of Artificial Intelligence Through Entertainment Media" Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8976224/ [5] Joe McKendrick, "Artificial Expectations: Time to Get Real About AI". Forbes, Published: July 23, 2024, Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/joemckendrick/2024/07/23/artificial-expectations-time-to-get-real-about-ai/ [6] "Kismet: Overview" MIT Media Lab, Available at: https://web.media.mit.edu/~cynthiab/research/robots/kismet/overview/overview.html [7] Drew Vigal, "Spike Jonze’s Her Explores the Potential and Impact of Artificial Intelligence" Medium, Available at: https://medium.com/@drewvigal/spike-jonzes-her-explores-the-potential-and-impact-of-artificial-intelligence-d90b5fe778d8
[8] Deepa Seetharaman, "OpenAI’s New Voice Assistant Brings ChatGPT to Life on Your Phone" The Wall Street Journal, Published: September 24, 2024, Available at: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/openai-voice-assistant-chatgpt-app-376ef6a2 [9] Matt Zoller Seitz, "Her" Roger Ebert, published: December 17, 2013.
Available at: https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/her-2013 [10] "10 Years of 'Her': What the Film Got Right About AI, What It Did Not" Sify. Available at: https://www.sify.com/ai-analytics/10-years-of-her-what-the-film-got-right-about-ai-what-it-did-not/
[11] "Scarlett Johansson Says OpenAI Ripped Off Her Voice After She Told the Company Not to Use It in Software" CNBC, Published: May 20, 2024, Available at: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/05/20/scarlett-johansson-says-openai-ripped-off-her-voice-.html
It’s unsettling how accurately this aged. We adopted the tech without answering the hard questions.
Here's the TL;DR version of this:
• Her framed emotional AI as comfort, not threat.
• The film shaped public expectations of companionship AI.
• Consent and autonomy remain unresolved questions.
• Simulated intimacy creates real dependency.
• Society adopted the tools without settling the ethics.