Early in "3 Body Problem," the new Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin's acclaimed science-fiction trilogy, intelligent life from another corner of the universe decides that a spectacle is required to get humanity's attention. On a cloudless night, the stars brighten, then flicker on and off, as if a kid were playing with a light switch, transmitting a series of numbers. Two physicists--one high and thus mesmerized, the other terrified--watch the phenomenon from a Gothic courtyard in Oxford, England. The next day, the stoner, Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), chalks the experience up to an elaborate hoax; the rest of the world also saw the stars twinkle in code, but the celestial blinks went undetected by Earth's most powerful telescopes. The otherworldly signal may have been a message just for Saul's companion, a nanomaterials researcher named Auggie Salazar (Eiza González) who's had a glowing countdown emblazoned across her field of vision for days.

The face of American character actor Richard Kind – melancholy, hangdog, a little dyspeptic – is exactly right for this high-concept midlife satire from director and co-writer Matt Kane. It's a variation on a familiar theme the time is the near future and Kind plays Felix, an architect in his 60s who has been pushed out of the firm he helped build and is now at home grumpily adjusting to unwanted retirement. His busy wife and grownup daughter have no great need of him these days so poor, emasculated Felix takes comfort in his hi-tech retirement gift: a pair of "Auggie" glasses, through which the wearer can see an "augmented reality companion", a virtual-reality hologram of exactly the kind of submissively understanding person your subconscious wants to see – in Felix's case, an extremely attractive young woman (played by newcomer Christen Harper). Felix understands that this is just a projection, a geisha hallucination programmed to respond with the right answers and expressions. But inevitably he begins to fall in love with her, and toys with the "extra" that Auggie owners are invited to purchase: a pair of hi-tech underpants that will allow him to feel his Auggie companion intimately, while his wife is out all day at her prestigious job. This is a movie comparable to Spike Jonze's Her, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with the Siri-type computer voice played by Scarlett Johansson, and Alex Garland's Ex Machina, in which Domhnall Gleeson is entranced by the AI robot played by Alicia Vikander; and like those films it creates a dreamy mood of indulgent comedy.

Auggie takes Her one step further. In the popular 2013 Spike Jonze film, the main character was a lonely man who fell in love with an artificially intelligent voice. In Auggie, the main character has a family and the artificially intelligent being has a physical form. But very similar issues arise. Co-written and directed by Matt Kane, Auggie stars legendary character actor and voice actor Richard Kind as Felix, a man who is given a very special gift at his retirement party.