"The Uncanny Valley" (the film by Miki Martinez) *spoilers*

[jolshefsky]

I dug back and found deesims' post quietly linking to The Uncanny Valley by Miki Martinez on Vimeo. I had downloaded it and watched it again recently (yea Vimeo, boo YouTube.) I had some ideas to throw around (that involve *spoilers* so just go watch it if you don't want to know anything. You've been warned.)

Of course one could analyze the purpose of the film to be about the loss of a parent and how that makes one feel alienated by everyone, and how the emotional drain makes one feel like an emotionless machine ... but that's not what I want to get into.

I was thinking purely from the film universe: that there is this robot woman who thinks she's just like everyone else. So when she's heading home and sees the hobo's face get all distorted, it's actually her perception of her mechanical failures starting. After all, she had just dropped her keys. Later, she drops the milk at home – another malfunction – and she's unable to parse what her roommate says to her. Basically, as people become like zombies to her, and they appear all distorted, and their speech is rendered as garbled screams, it is in fact her own systems malfunctioning.

When she goes back and plays the gig at the club and breaks a string, she glitches out right on stage. The audience stops and looks at her in silence: I figure they have noticed that she's a robot but can't quite believe it; when they get up to ask her if she's okay, she thinks they're attacking her and can't parse the motion, speech, or faces anymore. Music is the only thing left that is recognizable and she's soothed by it in her car. When she calls her mom – who is likely just an AI running on an answering service – she can't even understand that speech. So she falls back on her maintenance programming and heads to her creator.

To keep her human AI intact, the maintenance program fabricates the whole interaction with her father. There is probably no lake to cross, and no discussion on the dock. It's all an illusion to her AI. Sinking in the lake is probably what she's programmed to experience when she's shut off.

Also plausible is that the whole town is a construct full of other artificial people. Kind of a way to test her.

So I think it's a film worth checking out again. I want to draw attention to the robot effects: first with the eyes in the beginning, then again when she "wakes up" just before the alarm: her pupils are dilated as she comes online, but constrict to normal just before she (the AI) wakes up, thinking it was the sound of the alarm that woke her.