David is 11 years old. He weighs 60 pounds. He is 4 feet, 6 inches tall. He has brown hair. His love is real. But he is not.
Why it is hard sci-fi
Set after coastal cities have drowned from polar melt. Society rations resources and licences births, which is why a synthetic child even has a market. The film treats robots as legal property and follows that logic to its end. It refuses to make the AI question philosophical in the abstract and grounds it in custody, ownership, and disposal.
Science inside it
Climate-driven sea level rise as backdrop. Imprinting and attachment as engineered behaviours. The film borrows ideas from cognitive science about how a child forms a bond with a parent and asks whether reproducing the mechanism in code reproduces the love.
Spoiler alert
The ending leaps two thousand years forward. Humans are extinct. A descendant species of mecha excavate David and grant him one perfect day with a reconstructed copy of his mother, made from a strand of hair. The framing is sentimental but the underlying claim is bleak. Human extinction is presumed and the only beings left who care about us are the ones we built.