Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: Kate Dolan
Starring: Lily Sullivan, David Rysdahl, Claudia Doumit, Oliver Cooper, Steve Chusak, Emma Ramos
Irish writer/director Kate Dolan's excellent 2022 feature debut You Are Not My Mother marked her as a horror filmmaker to keep an eye on. Blumhouse certainly had their eyes on Dolan, snapping her up to direct a movie in the M3GAN franchise. The result is Soulm8te (the movie itself mocks that clunky title). An unfair victim of the disastrous box office performance of last year's M3GAN 2.0, Dolan's film was pulled from its theatrical slot and dumped onto VOD. Any connections to the M3GAN universe that may have previously existed have been scrubbed, resulting in a standalone killer sexbot thriller.
Soulm8te is a serviceable sci-fi thriller that suffers from arriving in the wake of similar movies like Companion, Subservience and the gender-flipped Raptus. It's yet another movie in which a lifelike AI-powered android becomes a little too sentient and turns against the humans. Unlike its peers however, Soulm8te doesn't shy away from acknowledging its '90s erotic thriller influences. There is a surprising level of nudity for a modern mainstream production, a lush orchestral score, slick cinematography and the classic erotic thriller trope of the supportive brunette who makes an enemy of the evil blonde.
That evil blonde is Sara (Lily Sullivan), a sexy android exactly like the ones we've previously seen Sophie Thatcher and Megan Fox play. She/it enters the life of David (David Rysdahl), a widowed software engineer who has become withdrawn following the recent death of his wife. When his company is taken over by a tech giant, David is introduced to the concept of "Soulm8tes", anthropormophised androids that need some further testing before they are introduced to the market ("the market" being horny rich dudes). At the suggestion of his tech bro boss Ben (Arty Froushan), David takes a prototype home and names it Sara. Unhappy with its subservient nature, David removes a host of parameters to make Sara more sentient. This results in Sara developing something close to human curiosity and emotions, including jealousy and rage.
We all know how this goes. If you've seen Subservience, this is essentially the very same plot, almost beat for beat. Dolan's writing (she is rumoured to have completely rewritten an original draft by Rafael Jordan) is much sharper than that b-movie though, and she has a lot of fun satirising corporate culture. Soulm8te is upfront about the true appeal of these tin women, with Sara supplied with a variety of outfits, all of which are tied into male fantasies. Another way Soulm8te stands out is in how it taps into female insecurity, with some of the film's most toe-curling scenes involving the "perfect" Sara making human women all too aware of their "flaws."
Unrecognisable from the grungy roles she essayed in Evil Dead Rise and Monolith, Sullivan is transformative here. Without having to resort to cheesy "ex-ter-min-ate" dead-eyed clichés, Sullivan always convinces us that she's playing a machine rather than a human. Even when Sara is afforded extra levels of emotion and sentience, Sullivan nails the idea that this is merely an imitation of humanity.
The core issue with Soulm8te is that despite being no more than a collection of metal, wires and fake flesh, Sara proves arguably more sympathetic than David. It doesn't have the complicated nuance of Fatal Attraction, which was upfront about Michael Douglas's character being an unlikeable asshole; rather it wants us to feel sorry for David. His dead wife is a cheap way to generate such sympathy, but said expired spouse doesn't stop David from quickly moving onto flirty co-worker Aubrey (a charming Claudia Doumit) or putting his dick in a robot. Sara, on the other hand, isn't a million miles from the robot kid played by Haley Joel Osment in Spielberg's A.I. She is a victim of David's desires, something the film acknowledges in a late monologue but never really bites into. Sara gives a lot of awful men what's coming to them throughout the movie, but many viewers (especially women) will be disappointed that David isn't one of them.
Soulm8te is on VOD from August 1st.
