Over the past several years, there have been a slew of movies and television shows centering around the idea of replacing your partner with a robot and/or AI.
I blame “Be Right Back,” the excellent episode of “Black Mirror” starring Hayley Atwell as a young woman who decides to test out a service that allows her to talk to an AI-version of her dead husband (Domhnall Gleeson). Other “Black Mirror” episodes like “Beyond the Sea” grapple with this idea as well, as do recent films like 2023’s “Foe” and this year’s “Companion.”
“Another End” is the latest iteration on the theme. Italian director Piero Messina’s film is closest to “Be Right Back,” starring Gael García Bernal as Sal, a man who loses his partner Zoe in a drunk driving accident. His sister Ebe (Bérénice Bejo) works for a company that aims to help people, like Sal, who have lost a loved one without warning. The company has created technology where the dead person’s consciousness can be uploaded to a living host body, allowing the dead person’s loved ones to spend a few more days with them before saying goodbye for good. While the lost loved one will be back emotionally and mentally, they will not look like themselves, but rather like their living host counterpart.
The biggest problem with “Another End” is that its main premise – a company that facilitates closure between two people, but one of them doesn’t look like themselves – is such an objectively bad idea, it’s a little hard to get on board. Pair that with the film’s interminable pacing and a third act twist that feels somehow both out of nowhere and yet incredibly predictable, and you’ve got an entry into the science fiction canon that feels far more interested in the aesthetic nature of its own premise than anything deeper.
“Another End” starts out with a promising opening sequence, Messina allowing the audience just enough information to make them wonder what, exactly, is going on. As Sal visits with an older woman in his building, a group of men suddenly show up, zip her sleeping husband into a body bag, and cheerfully bid her goodnight. Her “husband” ends up in a giant warehouse full of other hosts who all wake up and drag themselves home, back to their real lives.
The fact that the hosts are real people is the catch that keeps Sal from automatically saying yes to this whole endeavor, and once he does say yes, it presents a complication he didn’t quite expect. While things are going well with “Zoe” at home, his life starts to unravel when he sees Zoe’s host Ava (Renate Reinsve) out in the real world. This sort of development is rife with potential, particularly when it comes to the sexual and emotional complexities that the film is trying to consider. But “Another End” doesn’t have the sense of pacing or character to pull it off.
Bernal and Reinsave are both incredibly capable actors, but the dynamic between Sal and “Zoe” is muddled at best, a view of a relationship where neither character seems to know themselves, let alone the other person. Most of their scenes are relegated to their apartment, creating a sense of stasis that deadens any modicum of chemistry between them. Their dynamic is so up and down, they’re relationship so hot and cold, it’s difficult to know why they even liked each other in the first place.
Sal’s relationship to Ava is even stranger. Ava is a sex worker (the fact that she works at night is one of the reasons she can afford to take the host job), and has also lost someone close to her. But this is the only real characterization that she gets. It’s not so much that she remains a mystery to Sal, but that underneath her hard facade, there’s no complexity. Ava exists as a means to the film’s twist ending, nothing more.
It’s hard to write about “Another End” without getting into the twist, which hinges on Sal’s sister, Ebe. But the audience doesn’t spend nearly enough time with Ebe to make sense of her emotions, or to justify the fact that the film’s end hinges so much on her decisions and feelings. You can feel Messina wanting “Another End” to feel like “The Sixth Sense” – the type of movie that makes you want to immediately watch it again and look for everything you missed on the first watch. But there’s nothing to miss with “Another End.” It’s just a sci-fi far too interested in its mood at the expense of its characters.