A Woman Wonders If She’s Human in “I’m Not a Robot”

“I’m Not a Robot” opens on a tranquil workplace scene. Women sit at tables in an open-plan office, tapping away at their laptops. Walls of windows look out onto woodsy surroundings. Lara, a music producer, is wearing large headphones, listening to chorale music that blocks out any ambient office sounds. When she tries to update a piece of software, her machine issues a series of familiar prompts: identify some items in a pane of images and tick a box to prove you aren’t a robot. Lara clicks through, completing the task again and again, growing increasingly frustrated. Finally, she calls for technical support, and a voice on the line asks her to consider an unimaginable possibility: maybe she is, actually, a bot. The call plunges Lara into a shocking new reality that juxtaposes psychologically thrilling revelations with the humdrum setting of office life. In just over twenty minutes, the film moves from a darkly comic vignette about I.T. to a dramatic and eerie alternate reality, one that interrogates what we think we know of identity and autonomy.