Review: 'I'm Your Man' throws together a woman and a robot for a smartly funny look at algorithmic love

A thoroughly modern romance in every sense, director Maria Schrader’s “I’m Your Man” examines with dry humor and deep insight whether love is biological or programmable.

The nature of romance is what Alma Felsen (Maren Eggert), a Berlin archaeologist who is recruited to be a beta-tester for a tech company’s newest product: A robot romantic partner. Tom — played by Dan Stevens, the English actor who starred on “Downton Abbey” and the live-action “Beauty and the Beast” — is programmed to know all of Alma’s preferences and desires, with a built-in algorithm to adjust his responses and behavior to her tastes. Tom even speaks with a British accent, because Alma prefers foreign men.

For three weeks, Alma is supposed to let Tom into her apartment, and her life, to see whether his pre-set romantic gestures can approximate real love. But Alma’s a tough customer, seemingly immune to scented candles and rose petals in the bath, which Tom says 93% of German women would enjoy.

Slowly, Alma lets Tom in on more of her life — her work studying Sumerian cuneiform, her visits to her dementia-afflicted father (Wolfgang Hübsch), and why she can’t get over her colleague Julian (Hans Löw). But as Alma allows herself to get closer to Tom, she wonders whether this arrangement can ever be real, or just a computer-aided self-delusion.

Eggert, a veteran in German films but relatively unknown abroad, gives a nicely understated performance as a woman teaching this machine about the intricacies of being human. Stevens, who’s so drop-dead handsome you’d be surprised if his cheekbones weren’t made in a factory, brings the right amount of robotic hesitancy to Tom, and finds both humor and romantic charm in the A.I.’s efforts to approximate being a tender boyfriend. There’s also a nifty turn by Sandra Hüller (“Toni Erdmann”) as the tech-company rep who oversees the beta test.

Schrader, who won an Emmy for directing the miniseries “Unorthodox,” doesn’t overwhelm with the science-fiction aspects of the story (though the scene where a nightclub is populated with holograms is cleverly done), instead letting the human elements unfold gracefully and into unexpected directions. Schrader and co-writer Jan Schomburg (adapting a short story by Emma Braslavsky) playfully explore what it means to have a lover who gives a woman everything she desires — and whether that’s a good thing after all.

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‘I’m Your Man’

★★★1/2

Opens Friday, October 8, in theaters. Rated R for some sexual content and language. Running time: 108 minutes; in German, with subtitles.