I’m Your Man, review: is an android Dan Stevens your perfect man?

• Dir: Maria Schrader. Starring: Maren Eggert, Dan Stevens, Sandra Hüller, Hans Löw, Wolfgang Hübsch. 104 mins

Tom (Dan Stevens) is every woman’s dream man, as long as the dream in question is a strange and unsettling one in which the body of 1980s-vintage Richard Gere becomes possessed by the spirit of C-3PO. In that form, he’s one of the deeply unconventional romantic leads of I’m Your Man, a sensationally funny and gently science-fictional German rom-com.

Directed and co-written by Germany’s Maria Schrader, the premise resembles Steven Spielberg’s AI, but with added TLC. In a near-future Berlin, a single historian called Alma (Maren Eggert) has been enlisted for a special product trial. For three weeks, she and nine other volunteers will live with robotic humanoids who have been engineered to be their perfect partners – and who will only become more perfect with every passing day as their behavioural algorithms become increasingly attuned to their owner’s needs and desires.

Alma’s model is Tom, who’s tall, handsome and unblinkingly gracious, with piercing, deep blue eyes. Yes, he’s a touch intense, and talks with a clipped earnestness that can be a little unnerving. But otherwise he looks and acts the part. On the drive home, he breaks the ice by offering Alma unsolicited driving tips which will reduce her chances of an accident by 27 per cent. As I say, the attention to detail is uncanny.

Schrader and her leading couple consistently mine big, smart laughs from this ingenious premise, while wading fearlessly towards its more perturbing implications. At first, Alma is left cold by the very idea of a simulated soulmate, not least because in relationships, she craves novelty and friction. Tom’s romantic routines, meanwhile, triangulated from 17 million psychological profiles, tend to skew towards rose petals in the bathtub.

“Ninety-three per cent of German women desire this,” he says with confusion, as she turns down a glass of bubbly and a candle-lit soak. “Guess which group I belong to,” Alma snaps back. Eggert plays her with a brusque, self-possessed wit that may remind some viewers of Greta Gerwig, and it’s thrilling to watch her warm to Tom as his systems come to understand her better – while grappling with what this warming reveals about herself, since she ultimately knows the whole thing’s a charade, performed both by and for her alone. As for Stevens, he gives the finest performance of his post-Downton Abbey career – and almost entirely in German to boot.

Tom’s relentless suavity and bonhomie is a scream, with tiny behavioural tics to die for: the way he pours cups of coffee without looking, for instance, or his note-perfect benign joshing when Alma’s ex (Hans Löw) pops round to pick up some things. Yet Tom will also end up reckoning with his preordained purpose: the obligatory sentient-robot-staring-at-mannequins-in-existential-contemplation sequence here takes place in the Greek sculpture gallery of Berlin’s Pergamon Museum, and it’s a paragon of the form. Yet to what extent this is just another routine for Alma’s benefit is, like so much of the juiciest stuff here, left teasingly and refreshingly unresolved.

The film’s embrace of uncertainty calls to mind Toni Erdmann – another recent recent German comedy that was rich and nuanced, and whose star, Sandra Hüller, has a fun supporting role here as a representative of the AI firm. Also like that 2016 film, I’m Your Man takes a rare, revealing interest in its heroine’s professional life: Alma studies ancient cuneiform tablets, searching for hidden poetry and artistry in engravings that were long thought to serve strictly practical purposes. In other words, providing you look hard enough, a human soul can be found even between lines of purely functional code. Remind you of anyone?

In cinemas now