Erica sits in a lab in Japan with a neutral, symmetrical face and a voice built from synthesized speech. She has 20 degrees of freedom in her joints but cannot yet move her hands, a gap between her human appearance and her actual mechanics that the film keeps returning to. Her creator is Hiroshi Ishiguro, a roboticist known in Japan as the bad boy of the field for pushing android design past where most labs are willing to go. The camera watches him work on her in close, unglamorous detail, adjusting motors and speech patterns rather than staging a reveal, and lets Erica's own answers to questions sit alongside footage of her physical limits. There is no narrator arguing a thesis. The film simply places a machine built to pass as a person next to the parts of her that still give her away, and leaves the question of how close that gets to being human unresolved.