Wifelike is a sci-fi mishmash starring Elena Kampouris as a robowoman and Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the cop overjoyed to have taken delivery of a lookie-likie replacement for his dead wife.
It’s a mishmash and a half, in fact, a little Stepford Wives, more than a touch Humans, a bit of Ex Machina, and towards the end a chunk of Total Recall, with Meyers playing a guy who hunts down rogue wifebots when their programming goes wrong or they make a run for it – see Blade Runner for more on that.
There is, the Humans bit, in the background a resistance organisation called Sentient Citizens for AI Rights, a team of badass terrorists who are determined to liberate the subservient bots whose men love them very much because they’re so meek and accommodating. There are shots of one man weeping as his “wife” is dragged away.
It’s all very, very, very Paul Verhoeven in his 1980s pomp. Less bitingly satirical than Verhoeven, yes, but it is there in the portrait it paints of a mighty company, Wifelike, which produces the machinelike women, the chauvinist Agent Bradwell (Meyers) and the perky robot wife, Meredith (Kampouris) who starts out with the humanity of a speak your weight machine, learns to do sex almost before she can walk and then goes on to work out that there’s something very wrong with the picture her husband is painting of their previous life of connubial bliss.
There is titillation –“Would you like Meredith to touch you now? Please activate intimacy settings” – and Kampouris gamely plays along. In fact she is the making of the film. I last saw her incredibly coyly entering the sea on a nudist beach in My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3 just a few days ago but here she gets all her clothes off early on, perhaps to get it out of the way, perhaps because Alicia Vikander did it in Ex Machina.
But there’s more to her performance than nice shapes and strong glutes. She is funny in automaton-bot mode and shades carefully into something a lot more subtle as Meredith picks up smarts, self-awareness and wisdom. This bot is most probably a lot cleverer than her man, Kampouris’s performance suggests, where Meredith herself is staying shtumm.
Writer/director James Bird consciously apes the movies of the 1980s – it could almost have been made back then – with the retro-futurist set design, clunky tech and storyline about renegade outfits fighting the good fight. But his plotline is more a caricature of Jordan Peterson as relayed by an AI bot – in Wifelike men like fucking, cars and killing, so we’re told, and women are from Venus or something.
I’m being glib but it lends itself to it. It is almost entirely derivative and yet it’s not terrible. It has ambitions. For all the borrowing it’s not rote, and Bird has a point to make about all those Stepford scenarios beloved by film-makers – that behind every compliant wife there’s a psychotically possessive male. It’s a case of choose your weird, perhaps.
Meyers could almost have played the bot role once upon a time, he was so androgynously pretty. But now, 45 mostly hard-partying years have prepped him for a role just like this, as a man age is not mellowing so much as souring. His 45 to Kampouris’s 25 is also pertinent.
There is the odd bit of terrible sexploitation excess – Meredith’s attempt at masturbation – and one scene between Meyers and Doron Bell, who plays Agent Bradwell’s partner in law enforcement, that is fingernails-down-the-blackboard bad acting but for the most part Wifelike stays true to its ethos of genre referencing. It is sci-fi cheese.
Wifelike – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2023
