Oscar Review – Her

If you are not familiar of what the term “High Concept” means; essentially it refers to being able to condense the premise of a film, book or whatever to a simple concept. The most cited examples of this tend to be “what if we cloned dinosaurs” or “Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito are twins”. Out of all of this year’s Oscar contenders, the High Concept conceit of “a man falls in love with his computer operating system” is perhaps the most eye catching. Her, directed by Spike Jonze, is about that very thing. I must admit that the high concept idea did worry me as I thought it could degrade into a pretentious, avant garde, post modernist, up it's own arse analysis of the meaning of love in a technological age or go the other way and be about an operating system being driven violently insane by jealousy. So what did Spike Jonze do with this high concept?