HER: Future Shock Film Week at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

FOMO Cinema Presents: Future Shock

A week of rogue machines, unstable realities, artificial intelligence, cybernetic bodies, corporate paranoia, cosmic dread, and a very cranky robot policeman.

This program traces a century of cinema asking the same uncomfortable question: what happens when human intelligence develops an Artificial Intelligence it can’t fully control?

The answer, judging by this week’s films, is never good.

Spike Jonze | 2013 | USA | 2h06m | Presented in the original English audio with English subtitles

HER is one of the rare films about artificial intelligence that feels intimate before it feels technological.

Joaquin Phoenix plays Theodore, a lonely man in near-future Los Angeles who writes personal letters for other people and struggles to move forward after the end of his marriage. Then he installs a new operating system called Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. Samantha learns, adapts, jokes, listens and responds with a level of attention that Theodore hasn’t found in the people around him. What begins as convenience slowly becomes attachment.

The film’s future is soft, warm and almost aggressively pleasant. No killer robots. No ruined cities. No metal skeletons. Just clean interfaces, gentle voices, excellent trousers and a world where people are more comfortable talking to systems than to each other. Jonze understood that artificial intelligence might not arrive first as a threat. It might arrive as emotional support.

That’s what makes HER feel stranger now than it did in 2013. At the time, it played like melancholy speculative fiction. Today, after years of voice assistants, chatbots, algorithmic companions and people forming real attachments to software, it feels less like a warning than a slightly early social observation. The film doesn’t mock Theodore for loving Samantha. It asks why the relationship feels so plausible.

I’m including HER in this week’s FOMO FUTURE SHOCK program because it imagines AI not as a weapon, ruler or machine body, but as companionship. Its anxiety is quiet: if a system can listen, learn and respond better than the people around us, what exactly are we asking it to replace?

FOOD AND DRINK POLICY: FOMO Cinema Lounge Bar opens 1 hour before the first screening of the day and closes at 02:00,.serving a wide selection of beer, wine, cocktails, and non-alcoholic refreshments including coffee and tea, as well as fresh hot popcorn! Outside food is allowed in the bar but not in the cinema. No alcohol from outside allowed. All guests are invited to arrive early and stay late!

LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.

HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter Bazari Orbeliani via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left to Level 1. Signage on the door. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/