Different filmmakers tend to latch onto one color that represents what they think the future will be like. Will it be green and optimistic, like Emerald City? Will it be a cold gray, like in Minority Report and The Matrix? Whatever light filmmakers cast upon the future, it often comes with a dark twist that shows how technology uses us, rather than the vice versa.

And then you get Spike Jonze’s new movie, Her. It’s set in a semi-distant future full of colored glass panels, friendly skyscrapers, and people who still like to hang out at the beach and trample through snow just as much as their grandparents did. In this future, everything is set in a glow of pink, cast by the new OS1 operating system.

In this future, technology has taken a sharp left turn from what we experience now. While we interact with our devices using our eyes and our fingertips, people in this future interact primarily with their voice – and the effect is something startlingly more human. The technology talks back. It listens. It makes suggestions. And this seems to have also changed what the people in this future are like. They don’t crave a curved glass screen – they crave something just as human as they are.

As we watch Joaquin Phoenix’s Theodore Twombly fall in love with his operating system Samantha, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, we also get to see how non-cynical this view of the future is. People are eager to form any connection, online or in real life. They talk to people in chatrooms, but they still know their neighbors. They are lost in their devices, but they still stop and help someone on the street. They might pay people to write love letters for them, but they’re still engaged in long-term meaningful relationships.

Absent from these characters is the sense of false identity and narcissism that so many are worried technology is creating in us. Everyone is open about who they are, slow to judge and quick to show affection. They’re much more emotionally vulnerable than people of today, who are embarrassed to talk to the automated voice on a bank help line. 

Her feels like the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind of this decade, but a sweet pink lemonade version. Both movies, by building a larger-than-life technological trope, are able to fill their narratives with something more true-to-life, somehow, than real life itself. Her won’t make you doubt that you can ever trust your emotions. Instead it will make you oddly glad that you can at least touch the people you love.

Other talking points:

–Her proves that Scarlett Johansson does not need a body to turn men on.

-Comparing Amy Adams’ in Her and American Hustle shows how very versatile she is.

–Becky Lang