Cole Cuchna

So the title Electroma suggests a kind of cancerous expansion of technology within human life.

Guided by this central concept, the film places Daft Punk's two robot figures in a surreal, desolate future, where we first see them driving across an empty landscape in a car with a license plate that reads, human.

The metaphor is clear.

These half-human, half-robots are on a journey to reclaim their humanity.

They arrive in a town populated entirely by identical robot figures, a world of perfect uniformity that symbolizes the loss of identity in a society driven entirely by technological conformity.

Next they enter a sterile laboratory-like facility, where unseen figures perform a mysterious procedure that grafts human faces onto their robotic heads.

When they emerge from the facility after the operation, they carry themselves with a newfound confidence, strutting through the town to a playful flung instrumental,

But the townspeople are disgusted by their human faces.

They stare and judge, eventually forming a mob to chase them down.

Meanwhile, the duo's artificial faces begin to melt under the sun, and ultimately their attempt at restoring their humanity proves unsustainable.

The Electroma has grown too large.

Both socially and physically, the world is no longer fit for human life.

The two then take refuge in a public restroom, where they confront the impossibility of their desire and tear away the melted masks.

Cast out and alone, they wander into the desert.

Eventually, one robot asks the other to press the power switch on his back, willingly shutting himself down.

Left alone, the remaining robot attempts to do the same but can't reach his own switch.

Then in a final act of desperation, he removes his helmet to reveal a circuit board in place of a face, implying that at some point humans had decided to replace their brains with electronics.

He then smashes the helmet on the ground, uses a shard to reflect the sun, and sets himself on fire.

In the end, the only human quality left to preserve is mortality, and only in death do the robots become human after all.

Like Human After All, Electroma isn't intended to make us feel good.