Starring Marta Król, Marcin Sztabinski, Marieta Zukowska, Janusz Chabior, Olaf Marchwicki

Directed by Piotr Ryczko

At festivals throughout 2020/2021 including Grimmfest on Saturday 10 October 2020 online (https://www.grimmfest.com/) for which this review was written.

Believing herself to be a malfunctioning android, Renata resists claims by her husband, son and therapist that she is actually human, and mentally ill. But what is the truth?

Quietly getting positive buzz as it flits about the international film festival circuit, I Am REN (Jesten REN is its original Polish title, and also Panacea in some territories) is a less flashy entry into the sub-genre of sci-fi films dealing with the ‘reality’ of being an artificial person – and what that says about the human condition. While movies such as Blade Runner and Ex Machina, and TV dramas Humans and Westworld, use Artificial Intelligence as a plot device to drive their thrillers, I Am REN truly is focused on examining the world solely from the perspective of an android. Or, perhaps, a human who thinks she’s an android…

REN, we’re told early on, stands for Regenerative Emotional Neuro-Being. We first meet Renata (Marta Król ) being informed by her therapist (Janusz Chabior) that, in a rage, she assaulted her teenage son Kalim (Olaf Marchwicki). Unable to recall this, Ren is confused as to whether she is a mentally ill human or a malfunctioning machine and, as she’s sent away to a readjustment camp, writer-director Piotr Ryczko forces the audience to confront the implications of this ambiguity; whether android or human, very few of us want to die, and none of us want to go insane.

Based on Ryczko’s own mother, who suffered from schizophrenia, I Am REN’s primary interest is in the unravelling of a mind and, by placing us wholly within Renata’s transom, he succeeds in evoking the waking nightmare of being unable to differentiate between delusion and reality.

As well as full-blown mental illness, the film does, of course, touch on other issues. Whether Renata is human or android, the society she finds herself in is disturbingly patriarchal. Her role is clearly defined: a home-maker whose function is to care for her son and provide a sexual outlet for her husband (Renata’s blank eyed expression while her husband uses her as little more than a sex doll is one of many unsettling scenes). That a man would want a machine instead of a wife (as famously explored in the 1975 classic film The Stepford Wives) is only marginally more disturbing than the reality in many societies: that wives are glorified servants.

There’s the ever-present possibility, too, that Renata is the victim of coercive control, that her husband is, in fact, lying to make her doubt herself, thus triggering the mental breakdown to hide his own abuse. Or there’s even a strong chance that, despite everything Renata experiences, everyone is actually working in her best interests: her husband supports her, her son is angry and upset because she struck him, and the calm and patient therapist just wants to help.

Layering ambiguity upon ambiguity does mean the film occasionally suffers from narrative burn out – there’s the sense that the confusion instilled in the viewer is more by accident than design. But, for the most part, this is a taut and tense trip into an unravelling mind. It helps, of course, that Marta Król’s central performance is so strong – in some moments she is both brittle and unsure, like a damaged machine assessing a situation, but at other times she explodes with unbridled emotion – terror, grief, sorrow – that leads the audience to feel that, surely, she has to be human.

Verdict: That Renata seems more human than the actual humans (for the most part dour, cold and logical) isn’t exactly an original take for an AI movie – it’s a line that can be traced back, through West World and Blade Runner, to Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R that first gave us the word ‘robot’ in 1920. But, by positing that the nightmare of being an artificially sentient handmaiden is indistinguishable from the reality of a woman broken by male oppression, I Am REN is a stark warning that society’s technological over-reach is but the latest symptom of a far older and more insidious malaise. 7/10

Ian Winterton