A decade or so ago, the premise of “O Horizon” might have seemed like “Black Mirror” fodder: Fed various photos, videos, messages and personal effects of a dead man, a computer program devises an interactive simulacrum, available at any time for conversation via a phone app, live if not alive. Today, the idea doesn’t feel old hat so much as depressingly immediate, as discussions of the ethical and existential ramifications of AI chatbots have migrated from the hypothetical to the everyday. But writer-director Madeleine Rotzler — better known as Madeleine Sackler, the name by which she made her previous films — largely opts not to get into the weeds there, focusing instead on one bereaved woman’s experience of healing with technological assistance.
That makes “O Horizon” a warmer film than it might have been, thanks in large part to Oscar nominee Maria Bakalova‘s open, ingenuous presence as the young woman in question. But it’s also a less interesting or penetrating one, led by big feelings rather than big ideas, and ultimately noncommittal (or nonjudgmental, if you prefer) regarding the concept of artificial companionship and synthetic memory: Rotzler’s script suggests that these can be helpful to some people in some contexts, but also, you know, that we should be asking questions. One can see why the filmmaker – as the daughter of Jonathan Sackler, the late co-owner of Purdue Pharma — would resist being drawn on even abstract debates about pain management, but the film’s hopeful, semi-comic approach is overly cautious.
Abby (Bakalova) is a New York-based neuroscientist whose own research is adjacent to AI matters. With her Nobel-shortlisted superior Sandra (Alysia Reiner), she’s neurologically mapping a monkey’s brain with the intention of recreating sensations, divorced from the first-hand experiences that prompts them — potentially giving ailing humans a psychological short cut to comfort. This is arguably a more startling possibility than the high concept at the film’s center, though it’s treated as secondary, not least because Abby’s own head hasn’t been in the game since losing her father Warren (David Starthairn) the year before.
Struck in passing by an ad for a business called the Seeking a Friend Store, she heads impulsively to its distinctly lo-fi premises, run by a single, shaggy programmer named Sam (comedian Adam Pally), who promises her a fully conversant digital facsimile of Warren at the touch of a button. She acquiesces, cuing a grimly plausible reality of chirpy phone invitations to chat with a dead man, or to join his Spotify jam. At first she resists, but once she caves, she’s disarmed by this convincing version of her dad, who doesn’t just dispense paternal wisdom and kindness, but eventually argues with her in the way he used to.
Because he’s played by Strathairn with his signature air of rumpled decency, and pointedly little tonal variation between his appearances as an inorganic voice on Abby’s phone and as a living, breathing presence in flashback, the question of who or what this “Warren” is doesn’t come to the fore. You could say the recent horror hit “Obsession,” while not explicitly about AI, delved more provocatively into the uncanny effects of human simulacra made to serve one person’s emotional needs. “O Horizon” somewhat optimistically positions Sam’s services as a tool to help its heroine through a dark time — there is light at the end of this tunnel — but goes soft on the potential consequences of AI dependency and addiction.
The gauziness of the thesis here is matched by the generality of the characters and their lives. The film counts heavily on Bakalova’s natural, slightly vulnerable charm to color Abby, but she remains a frustratingly vague figure, without much in the way of distinguishing interests or acquaintances, and a showroom apartment that gives nothing away; even her grief is realized as an unspecific state of blank social withdrawal. Perhaps there’s something in there. Perhaps Abby pursues the reproduction of human experience to counter the void of her own life. Like much of what’s most interesting in “O Horizon,” however, it’s only the beginning of an idea; conclusions are harder to come by.
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