Computer Love
2022 · 15m · USA
Directed by Joseph Picozzi
Genres: comedy, romance, sci-fi
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, tender
Quinn, a sheltered teenage girl, finds her first real connection with her family's new sentient android housekeeper, Michael. When her parents catch on and threaten to replace him with a newer model, she must choose between her old life and her robot love.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
This is the kind of premise that makes you pause—a teenager's first love is literally a piece of household tech, and somehow Picozzi makes it feel less like a gimmick and more like a genuine interrogation of where intimacy actually lives now. Most scouts would bury this; it's too weird, too uncomfortable, and it actually *means* something.
Picozzi situates the film in a lineage of sci-fi intimacy narratives—Blade Runner's shadow hangs here—but what's remarkable is the restraint: the android is never explained or deconstructed, just present, which grounds the film in the domestic melodrama tradition rather than tech-spec posturing.
The single moment that makes this work is how Michael is shot—not as uncanny or other, but as *familiar*, almost boring in his ordinariness, which is the precise formal choice that makes Quinn's attachment feel real instead of conceptual, and it costs nothing except precision.
Reviews
A sci-fi short film about a girl and her robot lover.
Interesting concept about people fixated on technology in the future and what happens when someone falls in love with a robot, though it needed a little more story to finish the great idea.