Finch is a movie about building a machine to keep living after the world ends. That simple idea should carry a lot of weight. Instead, it mostly carries the weight of its own slow pace and thin character work.
The film follows a man named Finch (played by Joel Edgerton) who builds a robot to care for his dog after he dies. He records instructions for the robot to follow, hoping it can keep the dog alive until someone else comes along. The setup sounds grim and strange in the best way, full of the kind of quiet dread that makes sci-fi work. What follows is a film that never quite commits to that dread.
Trailer, via Apple TV.
Finch’s World
Finch takes place after some unspecified disaster has left the Earth empty. Cities sit abandoned, roads lead nowhere, and the only signs of life are the occasional animal. The film spends a lot of time showing this world, letting the camera linger on empty streets and ruined buildings. Some of these shots work well on their own, catching a sense of loss that the story itself never fully explores.
The problem is that the film treats the setting as scenery rather than context. Finch walks through these ruins without ever explaining what happened, why he is still alive, or what the robot is supposed to do once it finishes its task. The audience is dropped into a post-apocalyptic world with almost no information, and the film never bothers to fill in the gaps.
Joel Edgerton’s Performance
Joel Edgerton plays Finch as a man who has given up on humanity but not on routine. His performance is steady, controlled, and occasionally moving, especially in scenes where he explains his reasoning to the camera. He sells the loneliness of the character, the sense that he has made himself a solitary creature out of habit and grief. But the script gives him little to do beyond talking to himself and his dog.
Edgerton is clearly doing his best with limited material. He brings a weariness to the role that feels genuine, even when the dialogue around him falls flat. But a strong performance can only carry a scene for so long before the underlying weakness shows through.
The Robot’s Role
The robot, voiced by Caleb Landry Jones, is the film’s central invention. It is designed to carry out Finch’s recorded instructions, to feed the dog, clean the house, and generally keep things running until Finch’s plan is complete. On paper, this is a clever premise. In practice, the robot’s presence becomes more mechanical than human, more of a plot device than a character.
Caleb Landry Jones does what he can with the part, giving the robot a childlike curiosity and a literal-minded obedience that is meant to be touching. But the writing rarely gives him room to develop beyond these surface traits. The robot remains a tool for Finch’s plan, not a person in its own right.
The Dog’s Weight
The dog, a golden retriever named Gooby, is the emotional core of the film. She is loyal, playful, and utterly without guile. She is also the one character who is fully realized, simply because she does not need to speak to be understood. Her scenes are the ones that land, the ones that make Finch’s isolation feel real rather than abstract.
Gooby is the reason anyone watches past the midpoint. She is the constant in a world where nothing else holds together.
Where Finch Goes Wrong
The film’s biggest problem is that it never decides what kind of story it wants to be. It starts as a quiet character study about grief and survival, then drifts into action set pieces that feel tacked on. There is a chase sequence near the end that is meant to raise the stakes, but it arrives too late to anchor the film’s earlier meandering.
The tonal shifts are jarring. One moment Finch is talking to the camera about his wife and his regrets, the next he is dodging bullets in a dusty town. The film tries to balance quiet introspection with pulse-pounding action, but the two modes never settle into each other.
Caleb Landry Jones’s Work
Caleb Landry Jones deserves credit for taking on a role that could easily become a joke. He plays the robot with sincerity, treating it as a real being even when the script does not. His performance is the one bright spot in a film that otherwise struggles to find its footing.
His delivery is gentle and earnest, which makes the contrast with the film’s tonal shifts even sharper. When the action kicks in, his performance gets buried under the chaos. But in the quieter moments, he is the reason the robot feels like a character at all.
The Script’s Weaknesses
The script, written by Mike Johnson, is competent but unimaginative. It sets up ideas — the robot as a stand-in for Finch’s lost family, the ruined world as a mirror for his own isolation — and then barely develops them. The dialogue is often stiff, full of exposition that reads like it was written for a textbook rather than a movie.
There are moments of real tenderness, especially in the scenes between Finch and Gooby. But these moments are surrounded by stretches of filler, scenes where Finch wanders through empty buildings or drives down deserted highways without any clear purpose. The film seems to think that showing an empty world is enough to convey emotion, when in fact it only makes the emptiness harder to bear.
The Final Stretch
The film’s final act tries to resolve everything — Finch’s grief, the robot’s purpose, the fate of the world — in a rush of events that feel both rushed and inevitable. It is the most conventional part of the film, and it is also the weakest. The ending ties things up too neatly, offering a resolution that feels less like a conclusion than a shrug.
The chase sequence that precedes the finale is the closest the film comes to finding its rhythm. It is tense, well-shot, and it finally gives the action sequences a reason to exist. But even here the script stumbles, cutting away from Finch at key moments to show him reacting to events he cannot see.
A Solid Premise, A Shaky Execution
Finch is a film with a great idea and a weak execution. It is a movie about a man who builds a machine to replace himself, and it never fully commits to the horror of that idea. The film spends so much time establishing its world and its characters that it loses sight of what it wanted to say.
The performances are solid across the board, especially Joel Edgerton’s and Caleb Landry Jones’s. The cinematography captures a desolate world with skill. But the script fails to deliver on its promise, leaving the audience with a hollow feeling that the film never quite shakes off.
Here is how the film’s problems rank, from most troubling to least:
- The script’s refusal to explain the world it creates.
- The robot remaining a plot device rather than a character.
- The tonal shifts between quiet drama and action.
- The chase sequence arriving too late to anchor the film.
- Stiff, expository dialogue throughout.
- Scenes of Finch wandering through empty buildings with no clear purpose.
- The ending tying things up too neatly.
- The film’s failure to commit to its premise’s horror.
The Numbers
- Title: Finch
- Year: 2021
- Writer: Mike Johnson
- Score: 5.7/10
Finch is a film that is easy to admire and hard to recommend. It is a thoughtful, sometimes beautiful failure, a movie that understands its own premise better than it executes it. The result is a film that is worth seeing for its ambition, but ultimately forgettable for its execution.
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