Kristen Stewart plays a YouTuber and a sentient robot in 'Love Me.' She compared the movie to doing mushrooms.

The premise of the new movie Love Me is a unique one — Kristen Stewart voices a high-tech buoy that communicates with a satellite (Steven Yeun) after humans have disappeared from the Earth. To prove that she is a “life-form,” the buoy studies the species by watching YouTube videos of a lifestyle influencer and her partner, who are also played by Stewart and Yeun.

Love Me is the directorial debut of Sam and Andy Zuchero, a married couple who also wrote the film. It drew split reactions when it premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2024, but critics agreed for the most part that it was daring and weird.

The Zucheros started writing the movie in 2018, but it feels more relevant than ever in a world where humans have fallen in love with artificial intelligence and AI has become sophisticated enough to impact our everyday lives.

“I was always thinking about AI in terms of sentience, and I have kind of let go of that thought pattern and have started thinking about AI as a new form of life — and one that’s very apt at manipulating human emotions,” Sam told Yahoo Entertainment.

Andy added that “the movie is less about AI and more about us, and how two AI are seeing us and unpacking humanity and trying to figure out what it means to be alive and in love.”

The movie’s two stars filmed the scenes in which they played influencers first. To get into character, Stewart told Yahoo Entertainment that she “put some extensions in” and studied influencers, who had evolved in the years since the script was first written.

She said that at the time, she had a “surface impression” of what an influencer would be like, “which is just totally fake and selling an idea of life that is unachievable.” But she found inspiration from creators who were “pretty sweet and very revealing in their wooden deliveries.”

Working alongside Sam, Stewart created the character of Deja, who is a “naive, sweet, overearnest, desperate version of the two of us” — if they were influencers seven years ago. Stewart’s buoy character tries to learn from her posts to simulate becoming a “life-form” as much as possible.

“I think it was cool to imagine the idea of someone trying to crack through artifice and affectation,” Stewart said. “I feel like we all do that. You’re not born as any sort of defined thing, so you choose. She’s becoming this amalgamation of a thing, and that’s what we all do. It’s a really human relationship movie.”

Though Stewart’s buoy character lied when she claimed to be that particular influencer, the movie reckons with whether she was technically lying when she claimed to be a “life-form.” At the film’s center is a thought experiment about what AI might glean from us if all it truly knows is what we’ve posted on the internet, Andy told Yahoo Entertainment.

“Even though you can say [what we share on social media] is a poor representation of who we are, there are ideals that we have that are present there and that go to the core of humanity,” he explained. “But then it’s flavored by making a bunch of money and creating [a] brand that is you, which is a massive gap between who the [real] you is ... [so there’s] a process of deinfluencing and pulling back the curtain of the pretense of what we put out there versus who we actually are.”

Yeun told Yahoo Entertainment he was drawn to the film because of Stewart’s involvement and how the script felt earnest while still being a “bold, wild swing.”

“I actually had no idea how it was going to go, but there were parts where I was like, ‘Wow, people are making a movie like this right now?’” Yeun said. “What attracts me [to roles] is just [thinking], ‘Who’s going for something? Who’s trying to say something?’”

Stewart said they started filming at the “tail end of COVID stuff” when they were “all locked up and experiencing the world through screens.”

“There’s a rebirth that happens in tragedy when we’re all locked away. It was like, I guess we can choose how we want to continue,” Stewart said. “I was reading the book Sapiens [by Yuval Noah Harari] at the time, and I was like, ‘Nothing’s real, but everything’s real!’”

Stewart explained that the movie was a “large, elaborate acting exercise” that made her think deeply about humanity and relationships.

“This is not the way to sell the movie, but [it’s like] — if you’ve ever done mushrooms and sat around [wide-eyed, searching] for deeper exploration in order to realize you’re never going to find the destination,” she said. “Being together and trying is definitely enough and kind of all that we have.”

Love Me is in theaters Jan. 31.