COMPUTER LOVE | Omeleto

A teenager falls for a robot.


COMPUTER LOVE is used with permission from Joe Picozzi. Learn more at   / joepicozzi  .


It's the year 2100 and Quinn lives with her parents and their robot houseboy, Michael. Quinn has a boyfriend, but she has a secret infatuation with Michael, though Michael is sometimes confused by human interactions. But soon the couple fall in love and entertain fantasies of running away together.

But then Quinn's parents catch her and Michael together, and they make plans to replace Michael with a new model of robot. Quinn must make a choice: accept her fate and let Michael get turned in, or eschew everything she's ever known to pursue love with a machine.

Directed and written by Joe Picozzi, this quirky yet endearing sci-fi romance short is an accomplished balancing act of both emotion and tone, with a deadpan sense of humor, a distinctive visual approach and a sly sweetness. It all comes together in a peculiarly engaging narrative that falls into a tradition of forbidden teenage love stories, all the while gently probing at the boundaries between human and machine, as well as the head and the heart.

It all accomplishes this with a lightness of touch, starting with its sly yet gossamer writing and its ethereal electronic score. We're introduced to the forbidden love affair right away, but we're also entering into the distinctive world of the film, with its retro-futuristic Palm Beach aesthetic and Quinn and Michael's amorous fumblings, whose humorous awkwardness comes not just from age, but from the essential differences between Quinn and Michael.

However, the pair are caught by the parents when Michael abandons his smoothie-making duties for a tryst with Quinn. The storytelling has fun with its world-building, where people are matched and communicate by only apps and virtual-reality. But as the consequences of Quinn and Michael's love affair play out, there's also a more sinister undertone that seeps into the film, where a technology-managed future is antiseptic and Quinn's relationship with her parents and her app-matched boyfriend Chumley is portrayed as emotionally hollow.

Quinn truly desires more connection than this world can give her, and she finds it in Michael, who, for all his android-like qualities, cares about Quinn. Actor Ali Gallo as Quinn balances her lovely performance between the drone-like demeanor the world expects of her and a more heartfelt yearning for connection and intimacy. That yearning is achingly genuine and forms the emotional heart of COMPUTER LOVE -- one that propels Quinn towards a confrontation between conformity and the unknown. Though it never abandons its ironic humor and its droll playfulness about the future, the film develops into a melancholic sincerity that makes it sweetly affecting and memorable, and by its end, we're rooting for Quinn and Michael and their unknown future.