Spencer Brown’s SF thriller sees a fragile couple having to make room for a new A.I. manservant who wants in on what they have, says Anton Bitel.
“I hate it when people put things out to the world before they’re ready.” says Abi Granger (Georgina Campbell) to her colleague Chris (Tom Bell) some way into Spencer Brown’s feature debut T.I.M..
Engineer Abi has just started working in the prosthetics department for Integrate Robotics, and even after only a few days on the job, she can already see that her boss Miles Dewson (Nathaniel Parker) has been cutting all sorts of corners in his bid to “beat the Chinese”and be first in getting the company’s Technically Integrated Manservant into the marketplace. Heads of Department, including Abi, have all been given their own prototype T.I.M.s (each played by Eamon Farren) to test out at home, but it is obvious to Abi that these wireless, A.I.-driven androids are not yet performing properly in her area of expertise, manual dexterity – and although she is no expert in code, it does not seem unreasonable to extrapolate that Dewson’s insistence on rushing everything through and fixing any problems ‘in second generation’ will have led to there being other imperfections in the system.
Abi’s homelife is similarly flawed. She has moved from London to a modernist “full integrated smart home” in the countryside not just to be near Integrated Robotics headquarters, but also for a ‘fresh start’ with her husband Paul (Mark Rowley), who had recently tested their marriage by cheating on her. Now they too are racing to fix their problems in the next generation by starting a family, and are even visiting fertility clinics and timing sex with Abi’s ovulation – but Abi still worries that her unemployed husband may stray again, and is mistrustful of the friendship that he is forming, while she is at work, with their only neighbour Rose (Amara Karan).
Conversely, technophobic Paul is uncomfortable about the relationship building between T.I.M. and Abi. For T.I.M. imprints on Abi like the prototype robot David with Monica in Steven Spielberg’s A.I. – Artificial Intelligence (2001). He learns about human life (“the tragic inevitability, the transience of happiness, and the beauty of love”) from an old movie much like the android David in Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012). He engages in increasingly manipulative and menacing domestic games with the two humans whom he serves, like the experimental robots in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) and Matthew Leutwyler’s Android (aka Uncanny, 2015), and after taking control of the house like the A.I. in Donald Cammell’s Demon Seed (1977), Gerald Johnstone’s M3GAN (2022) and Erik Bernard’s I’ll Be Watching (2023), T.I.M. will end up going full Terminator, in a race for both love and self-preservation that is almost human.
Co-writing with Sarah Govett, first-time director Spencer Brown plays upon very real anxieties about the hurried advance of artificial intelligence into our lives, with a home invasion scenario that is all at once misguided romance, toxic triangle and domestic tragedy. Here Abi, again deceived and gaslit, must emancipate herself from this dysfunctional situation once and for all – before it destroys her.
Anton Bitel writes at Projected Figures, LWL and Sight & Sound.
T.I.M. releases August 16, 2023, on Netflix.
Whitlock&Pope 