Before Project Hail Mary, Sandra Huller Appeared In A Deeply Underrated Sci-Fi Movie On Netflix

Maria Schrader's 2021 sci-fi romance "I'm Your Man" is an example of the Turing Test in action. A Turing Test, as most science enthusiasts will be able to tell you, is a conversational exam wherein a human subject is asked to converse, via text only, with two people on the other side of a wall. One of the two people is actually a computer that has been programmed to answer in a human-like fashion. If the computer can answer questions in the same way as the hidden person, then the computer has proven, at least to some extent, that it has artificial intelligence. The test was named after Alan Turing (the subject of "The Imitation Game"), who felt that, because we cannot measure things like consciousness and a machine's ability to "think," then an outward appearance of thinking and conversation is good enough. 

"I'm Your Man" begins with the film's protagonist, Alma (Maren Eggert), having a conversation with a devastatingly handsome man named Tom (Dan Stevens) at a dance club. Alma asks Tom about math and poetry, odd topics to cover while at the club. When Tom asks her to dance, he begins repeating the same phrases over and over. It turns out that Tom is a high-tech android, and Alma was giving him a Turing test. 

Alma, you see, has been asked to test the humanity of a new line of ultra-human robots being built to serve as ersatz romantic partners. After Tom's glitches are fixed, he is sent home with Alma, where he attempts to charm her 24 hours a day. He is her man. Sandra Hüller plays the unnamed employee of the android company that has issued Tom for testing. It's a pretty damn great movie that's currently playing on Netflix.

Alma, it should be noted, works as an archaeologist at the struggling Pergamon Museum in Berlin. This is something of an irony, as her job has her peering into the lives of ancient people, but her own life is frustrating and empty. She works with her ex (Hans Löw) and only ever really spends time with her father (Wolfgang Hübsch), who is suffering from intensifying dementia. She has agreed to test a romance robot merely as a means of securing more funding for the museum, but Alma is not amused by Tom in the least. 

One might already see the preceding story in one's head. Tom, while not human, is observant enough to really "see" Alma for the first time, and she begins to consider that this robot might be unlocking parts of her romantic side she had forgotten about. But "I'm Your Man" strays from those beats in refreshing ways. Alma is too complex a character for the story to go where you think it will. Indeed, while Tom does begin to unpack much of her personal baggage, he does so under the preprogrammed auspices of a doting lover. He's not so much "her man" as a very attractive human golden retriever. Dan Stevens, speaking German, is amazing in the role of a robot who understands human interaction, but can only repeat it with maybe 80% accuracy.

Maren Eggert is all too human as Alma, too wise to accept the artificial affections of a robot man. Alma has past trauma and a lot of hang-ups that an attentive android cannot address, and her interests run to the intellectual.

Of course Alma is attracted to Tom — he's played by Dan Stevens, after all — but she cannot allow herself to love him. The ultimate message of the movie is that technology might be able to provide everything we want, at least on a superficial level, and that that is definitely not healthy. How will we grow and learn to emotionally survive on our own if we need artificial intelligence to help us through everything? Wouldn't, you know, intelligence be better? 

Sadly, "I'm Your Man" was not nominated for Best International Picture at the Oscars, although it should have been. Maren Eggert did win Best Actress at the Berlin International Film Festival, however. 

Sandra Hüller plays the all-too-chirpy robot company employee, as mentioned, and she is incredibly amusing. She's all smiles, acting as if she's doing market research. Hüller was already a known quantity, having exploded onto the German cinematic scene in 2006 for her performance as a woman with epilepsy in the movie "Requiem." Thanks to her performance in "Toni Erdmann" in 2016, Hüller also became an international darling. "I'm Your Man" came out the same year as the English-language spy thriller "Munich: Edge of War," pushing her further into the limelight. In 2023, she appeared in both "Anatomy of a Fall" and "The Zone of Interest," two of the year's best films. The former netted her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress. 

And now, in 2026, one can see Hüller in "Project Hail Mary" and in Alejandro González Iñárritu's upcoming film "Digger." She is also in the Polish biopic of Thomas Mann, "Fatherland," directed by Paweł Pawlikowski.