Ruby Sparks

Ruby Sparks (2012) is a fantasy romance with Paul Dano you can watch online on iFILM. It was directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the duo behind Little Miss Sunshine. Calvin is a novelist who hit it big at nineteen and has been blocked ever since. The cure arrives in a dream: he invents a girl named Ruby and starts typing her into being.

Then she shows up on his couch, fully alive. Zoe Kazan wrote the script and plays Ruby herself, and the catch soon surfaces: whatever Calvin writes about her on his typewriter instantly rewrites who she is. He can make her adore him with a single line. He can make her miserable just as fast. The real question is whether he notices where the fantasy ends and a person begins.

The film reworks the old Pygmalion myth, but skips the fairy-tale ending: the more Calvin edits Ruby to suit himself, the more unsettling his control becomes. Antonio Banderas, Annette Bening and Steve Coogan fill out the cast. Stream Ruby Sparks (2012) online on iFILM.