Brian and Charles finds unexpected tenderness in a robot Frankenstein story

polygon.com:

The Polygon team is reporting in from the all-virtual grounds of the 2022 Sundance International Film Festival, with a look at the next wave of upcoming independent releases in sci-fi, horror, and documentary film.

One of the oldest questions in science fiction, posed as far back as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and as recently as this year’s After Yang asks, “If we create artificial life, what happens when it realizes its agency and looks beyond us?” The answer is often dark and foreboding, resolving in the cruel manipulations of Blade Runner or the bloody revenge of Ex Machina. Her presents a less violent but still melancholy vision of AIs that quickly surpass humans and regard them with benevolent indifference.

The gentle 90-minute comedy Brian and Charles is different. For writer-performers David Earl and Chris Hayward and director Jim Archer, adapting their 2017 short film of the same name, this drama of creator and creation plays out in quirky hijinks and modest personal growth, and asks questions that are of no less import, but much more relatable.

Brian (played by Earl), a loner and tinkerer living amid the desolate beauty of the Welsh hills, has invented — almost by accident — a robot companion. Charles (Hayward) is seven feet tall and comically inelegant, with a washing machine for a torso, topped with a quizzical mannequin head. Brian is delighted with the company, especially after Charles teaches himself English by reading a dictionary overnight. But he’s also instinctively secretive about his creation, and he forbids Brian to leave the house or meet any other humans. Eventually, he relents enough to allow Charles to tour his garden. “Does the outside stop at the tree?” Charles asks, with the halting diction of