‘Eternal You’ Review – AI Blurring The Lines [Sundance 2024]

If there’s one thing that’s abundantly clear about artificial intelligence, it’s that it’s not going anywhere. For decades, sci-fi films and shows like Black Mirror and Her have speculated about the future of AI and what it may entail for future generations. In the intriguing and thoughtfully crafted documentary Eternal You, the subject becomes life after death. The audience is asked to consider what they might do if presented with the opportunity to speak to a loved one long after they’ve died: something that many people have already done through AI technology.

Directors Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck return to Sundance this year after their 2018 documentary The Cleaners. Throughout their latest topical documentary, multiple subjects are interviewed about their use of a new digital program called Project December. Like many new start-ups of its kind, Project December claims to connect people with their deceased loved ones.

The documentary features multiple interviews, including family members mourning their loved ones to the founders and CEOs of many of these start-up companies. Through the wide range of subjects, Eternal You explores the continuous blurring of lines between the living and the finality of death with AI. While this film’s focus fizzles sometimes, it is most effective — and eerie in implication — when serving as a meditation on human loss, the inevitability of death, and how tech companies aim to profit off of those emotions through the use of AI technology.

The film doesn’t present anything necessarily groundbreaking about AI developments for audience members who have been keeping up with the news for the past couple of years. What it does excel at, though, is providing the necessary space to empathize with grieving people who are most susceptible to using this technology to fill a void.

One inquiring and curious “I wanted to see if he was okay” leads people down a rabbit hole piqued by their human curiosity. The most powerful scene in the film follows a large family gathering together to test their late grandfather’s AI voice. The impact of this technology is not just about the people currently living, but the children who will soon lead the future themselves and become accustomed to always living with AI.

One major development in AI technology that people may be familiar with is the 2019 South Korean documentary titled Meeting You, which featured a mom reconnecting with a virtual version of her deceased daughter. The inclusion of this project brings the film to a deeper conversation about the moral and ethical implications of claiming to reconnect people with loved ones.

The film’s various interviews with some of the major figures leading the future of AI also shed light on human obsession with constantly trying to understand life after death. Trying to predict where our technology will take us moving forward is deeply ingrained in human culture and desire since the beginning of civilization. Again, many of these themes can feel quite familiar, making portions of the documentary feel like retreading ground. But these conversations are effective when trying to better understand what draws people to pay for such services as Project December and You, Only Virtual.

There are no easy answers or solutions manufactured to make the future of AI technology seem brighter. Instead, directors Block and Riesewieck leave us with as much uncertainty as we came into the documentary, despite all of the new information learned. And that is very much intentional.

With a clear sense of pacing and flow between the different subjects being interviewed, Eternal You probes necessary conversations about how AI is being used to try and “beat” death. While the documentary doesn’t quite cut as deep as it wants to in its critique of capitalism, it still leaves its mark on the ongoing and unsettling conversation about AI.

Eternal You had its World Premiere in the World Cinema Documentary Competition section of the 2024 Sundance Film Festival.

Directors: Hans Block, Moritz Riesewieck

Rated: NR

Runtime: 87m