There's something strangely perverse about it: on the one hand a passion project not of one but of two persons - a passion transferred from one person to another actually, thereby acquiring aditional layers, of grief and rememberance, but also of intellectual complexity, a love letter both to a book and to a man (to a woman too, in a way, because he gifts her the unfilmed film), to time spent together... and on the other hand so neat and well-rounded an aesthetic object, a 70 minutes minature caleidoscope of things to do with (great) literature.

Favorite scene: the girl trying to talk Bartleby into action.

The ai apocalypse will rise from the ashes of phony art movies. Idiosyncratic high-concept trash par excellence, pretty clearly the best thing Andrew Niccol was ever involved in. Will never feature in any Al Pacino career retrospective yet it should, because his quirky, comitted performance is used both to "sell" the main premise and as an end in itself. The scenes of him embodying Simone are weirdly beautiful.

Also, probably one of the few great floppy disc movies.

A24 discovered arthouse miserabilism and the world is a worse place now.