If you’re jonesing for some homicidal AI, but M3GAN 2‘s January 2025 release seems impossibly far away, never fear! There’s another robot in town, and he’ll scratch your itch—with a carving knife.
T.I.M., directed by Spencer Brown, opens with a tech worker’s dream: Abi (Georgina Campbell) has gotten a sweet new job at a robotics company, which comes with a picturesque house in the countryside. Even better, the job includes a robotic manservant named T.I.M. (Eamon Farren), short for “technologically integrated manservant,” who’s connected to all the phones, watches, and other smart devices in the house. He’s sort of like a walking Alexa who can give foot rubs!
But when the movie opens, there’s already drama brewing: part of the reason Abi has taken the job is because she and her husband Paul (Mark Rowley) are trying to rebuild their relationship after his affair with another woman. A struggling couple, a history of infidelity, a robot determined to please his mistress at all costs—what could possibly go wrong?
Let’s get this out of the way right now: yeah, the plot of T.I.M. is pretty generic. It’s a standard stalker thriller, in which the stalker happens to be a robot. Why exactly does T.I.M. inevitably turn violent? Eh, who knows? Maybe it’s the same reason my phone’s autocorrect keeps changing ordinary words into obscure stuff no one’s never said. As a culture, we’re terrified of the AI we’re unleashing in our everyday lives—AI that monitors our heartbeats, drives our cars, and composes our emails for us—and T.I.M. taps into that fear without really revealing anything new about it.
But, you know what? That’s okay. I’m fine with that. Maybe this is the Luddite in me (I’ll be screaming “I told you so!” when everyone’s Alexas and Teslas decide to kill them), but the problems with AI are so colossally obvious that you don’t need any philosophical navel-gazing to make a good movie about them. Deepfake videos are bad. Robots that can control your whole life are bad! Why is anyone out there pretending these things are good? T.I.M. treats it as a given that we can’t handle the monster we’ve unleashed in AI, and it doesn’t need to get any more sophisticated than that.
What I’m saying is that despite its shallow premise, T.I.M. is a fun, tense, darkly comic movie about a simple robot who loves too much. Farren does a great job portraying an android who can instantly deduce someone’s state of mind from their heart rate, but is incapable of understanding that you’re not supposed to kill people. Rowley is brooding and resentful as Mark, and frankly? I’d be, too, with T.I.M. skulking around my wife. Campbell’s persisting disbelief in T.I.M.’s evil side strains credulity, but it’s fantastically creepy to watch Abi fall under his sway.
T.I.M. doesn’t chart a path forward in our increasingly fraught relationship with artificial intelligence. But maybe that’s because our path is much simpler than we think it is. Behold T.I.M. and be warned: the robotic utopia the tech industry is trying to sell us is too good to be true.
It does seem to give good foot rubs, though.
(featured image: Netflix)
