Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck – 'Eternal You' movie review

The outlandish dystopian nightmares presented by the TV series Black Mirror, which picks apart humanity’s volatile relationship with technology, are steadily creeping into the reality of contemporary culture as AI programmes increase in intelligence and rich billionaires, in turn, crank up their arrogance. While Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is desperately trying to make the ‘Metaverse’ happen, despite losing $46.5billion since 2019, it is the world of AI that seems to be taking over, intimidating much of the world with its rapidly growing intellect.

Such is the key point of exploration for Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, the filmmakers behind the Sundance hit Eternal You, a succinct documentary that offers viewers a peek into the world of multiple AI startup companies that are attempting to link the world of the living with the dead. Some of these programmes offer a text-based programme, which allows users to chat with their deceased loved ones as if they were still alive, whereas others provide full VR experiences that take you to peculiar liminal spaces where your passed loved one has been recreated in pixel form.

The result is something that is equally disturbing as it is entirely fascinating, spending time with the maverick minds who built such programmes, as well as the users who benefit from their services. Only excavating the details on the very surface of this issue. However, the makers of this controversial tech are only tentatively criticised and probed, and even the users feel a little detached from the true surrealism of it all.

Such doesn’t stop Eternal You from being a neat think piece, but it does certainly stop it from being in the same existentially pondering field as the work of Werner Herzog, the master documentarian who has explored a similar world of AI with far more conviction. Of course, not every director can match the profound energy of Herzog, but such a subject feels so entirely complex and abstract that you wish you had such a sagacious figure as the master of ceremonies.

No doubt, its most fascinating moments are when it questions how and why such programmes can go a little rogue, with one bot on the other side of the text-based startup suggesting that their soul was wandering lonely in hell. Yet, predictably, rather than diving deep into this issue, the filmmakers prefer to simply ponder, ‘Oh, that’s strange’, without ever fully dissecting the consequences of such eventualities.

This idea of ‘playing God’ and exploring humanity’s dogged desperation to prevent death rather than find healthy ways of grieving is the central essay of interest here. At times, the directors touch on this, too, briefly questioning whether these tools help or hinder one’s experience of grief, focusing specifically on the viral video released three years ago, which saw a South Korean woman be reunited with her deceased daughter in a completely computer-generated VR world.

The footage is heartbreaking but also thoroughly disturbing, as if the AI programme is taunting the mother with an impossible echo of the past that cannot be willed into physical existence. Yet, the emotions are complex; after all, the mother signed up for the programme and appears, in the end, to have been helped by the experience. There is, indeed, more emotion and meaning in that one sequence than there seems to be throughout the rest of the entire documentary.

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