Life Like (2019)

Life Like is a sleek, intimate sci-fi thriller that finds its hook in something more unsettling than killer tech: the way comfort, loneliness, and desire can rewrite a person’s moral compass when no one’s watching. Set largely within an immaculate suburban bubble, it uses the arrival of a stunningly human android to turn a marriage into a pressure cooker, where every glance and small boundary crossed feels charged, plausible, and quietly dangerous. The film’s pleasures are in its mood and escalation—cool, modern, and erotic in a tense, uneasy way—anchored by committed performances that make the emotional mess feel uncomfortably real. If you like your science fiction less about gadgets and more about the fragile definitions of intimacy and humanity, it’s a satisfyingly provocative watch; if you prefer clean-cut heroes and clear answers, you may find it deliberately disquieting.

Life Like wants to be a sleek, intimate sci-fi thriller about loneliness, desire, and what happens when a “perfect” helper starts feeling a little too human. The problem is it often plays like a familiar domestic-android cautionary tale with obvious turns and a script that leans more on awkward erotic tension than genuinely sharp ideas, so if you’re hoping for smart, fresh world-building or real psychological depth, you may get impatient. The pacing can feel flat and the character choices sometimes exist mainly to push the plot where it needs to go, not where believable people would go. That said, the small-scale setup and the eerie, controlled vibe do work at times, and if you enjoy slow-burn techno-jealousy dramas with a slightly trashy edge, you’ll probably find it watchable.