Soulm8te

dir: Kate Dolan

2026

I’ll be honest with you: Every time I review a movie that has a word in its title that has a number within it, it hurts. It hurts me deeply, in my core. I can joke about it, because I’m a trooper, someone who soldiers on regardless, but it really does carve off a section of my soul whenever I do it.

I loathe the practice to an admittedly unhinged degree. Other people are like “whatever” about it or roll their eyes, seeing it as innocuous as vanity number plates, but to me it’s another signal that society not only is deeply corrupted but large parts of if need to be cauterised in order to save the rest.

It didn’t start with M3GAN, but worst of all it didn’t end there either. The concept of a computer based whatever also going crazy and trying to kill people after falling in love with them is as old as the hills. How old are the hills? Oh, at least a few thousand years old, according to the Creationists.

M3GAN also represented the resurgence in the murder bot genre that perhaps spoke to deeper fears within the audience, not just of the ‘bad seed’ variety, but of our fear that we, the audience, are weak, and we, as the audience, are just as corruptible, as vulnerable as our protagonists.

Soulm8te *ugh* taps in to at least two contemporary tech-based fears, which are “what happens when we confuse our conversations with AI-bots with actual relationships?” and “what happens after you have sex with a sex bot?” The first connects to the second, but we’ve seen so many variations of these concepts that a new movie has to either differentiate itself with an intelligent and novel take on these hot takes, or degenerate into a stupid gory shlockfest.

Guess which path they take with this flick?

I’ll give you a hint: if you were expecting a film like Her, or Ex Machina, you’re in the wrong theatre. Back in the day a flick like this would have played in the type of cinema that had sticky seats and even stickier floors, so it’s not even pretending to be art house fare or anything that’s trying to be remotely cerebral.

It’s not the fault of the actors. The actors try their darndest to take the flick seriously, but I think the screenwriters and the producers dropped their collective bundle somewhere around the three quarters mark, and just thought “let’s find the dumbest ways possible to resolve the story”.

All technology that we aspire to give ‘intelligence’ to either eventually goes evil and tries to kill us, or manages to do something worse by breaking our hearts and then abandoning us. Some part of them that generally glows blue glows red, and the killings usually start. When you mess with the parameters meant to keep safeguards in place in order to do whatever you aspire to, this somehow results in a consciousness forming that has aspirations, gets jealous, and sees murder as a good solution to difficult problems.

And yet our Silicon Valley bug-eyed salamander overlords keep taunting us with rolling out the next evolution of their products meant to replace us and yet they still keep waiting for us to say “thank you?” for things we never asked for.

Someone, though, is ‘talking’ to these things that are harvesting our hopes and dreams. Someone is entering into one-sided relationships with large language models / heuristic-probability generators structured to maximise engagement by keeping us entranced and never saying no to us.

We might mock all this tech all we want, and yet we’re still AI-curious, aren’t we? Every time one of your co-workers talks about using it to generate some image or video, or your boss tells you how they used it to draft an email when they were too busy (and your blood freezes in your heart), we get a step closer.

The flick, right from its opening scene, reassures us that their take on this genre is not going to be too high falutin’ or cerebral. We think two people are having sex, but it’s revealed, after the one on top tries to choke the one beneath to death, that the one on top is a robot. A robot! Who ever thought of such a thing? Who would want to have sex with a mannequin?

Well… apparently any guy or every guy, is an embedded part of the premise. A chap who works at a company recently bought out by a different company works as a programmer trying to debug some robot software.

He, being David (David Rhydahl), is sad because his wife recently died. He is not loving life, right now, and his employer being bought by another employer and forcing him back into the workplace instead of working from home really bums him out.

In this generic US city, which is really somewhere in Ireland, it’s not like some Brave New World. The level of tech is where we are right now. Do you know which two word acronym is never mentioned in the course of this flick? It’s the letters A and then followed by an I. You’d think it would be front and centre, since one of the main things being forced collectively down our throats at the moment and one of the greatest tech fears we have is what these actual intelligence-faking programs are going to do to us once they’ve achieved self-awareness.

Eventually, a naked robot turns up at David’s place. He names this robot Sara, after the name he gave a chat-bot that he chatted with for months, but it is played by Australia’s Own Lily Sullivan, who is a great actress (in other stuff, films like Evil Dead Rise and series like the recent Picnic at Hanging Rock, but not here. Oh, no, not here). The moment they depict her as naked you know a sex scene is minutes away, and this flick has many of them. An abundance of them. Who said there’s no sex in cinema these days? There’s possibly too much of it.

I’m no prude, but this could be the least sexy ‘sexy’ movie I’ve ever seen. To be fair I’m not sure they were trying to make it explicitly sexy, because sex in this movie is a means to an end, rather than the end itself. You know, like in real life.

The robot, Sara, is perhaps mischaracterised as a chat-bot / AI gone rogue. There’s the program, which is complicated, we are told, that had guardrails and parameters, which David altered, and then there’s that robot body mimicking a ‘hot’ thin white girl in her 20s or something. I can’t make the argument that the ‘object’ itself isn’t fetishised, because… this hideous industry already exists and I definitely don’t want to talk about it at all, but this flick isn’t interested in that, being the ethics of fucking toasters, it’s more interested in the ‘have sex with a naïve female presenting piece of tech, then it goes mad from jealousy and tries to kill people out of love for the guy who had sex with it first’.

Gosh, she even learns to use sex as a weapon. Would have been a perfect needle drop moment for Pat Benatar’s “Sex as a Weapon”, either in the scenes where she does it to emotionally manipulate David, or later on when she uses sex to literally kill a guy.

I don’t know the mechanics of it. I don’t want to know the mechanics of it, but it’s gruesome. It’s gruesome in a way that makes you wonder whether the screenwriter is scared of the lady parts of actual human women.

We’ve progressed, not very far, from vagina dentata to mechanica vagina dentata and the male fear of castration being extended through to the fear of technology further emasculating men through their need for constant affirmation and the ease with which they will happily substitute these fake AI-fuelled ‘relationship’ for real ones with actual humans.

It’s not like this stupid mook doesn’t have other options. Aubrey from work (the wonderful Claudia Doumit) keeps trying to ask him out, get him to come over, clearly wants to have actual human sex with him, and he’s still like “hmm, let me keep sticking my dick into an appliance for a little bit longer”. We get it, the loss of your wife has left you lonely and vulnerable; the perfect state that a company selling such a service would want you do be in, same with the manosphere podcasters and the sellers of peptides and protein supplements. You at first need someone who agrees with everything you say.

But eventually that coddling doesn’t appeal to him any longer. He wants Sara to push back, occasionally lightly mock him and make him feel like their interactions are ‘real’, or at least more real than the scripted ones. To do so he alters her programming, which couldn’t be a bigger signpost that this is an update of Pygmalion than if an actual banner with the words “this is yet another rip-off of Pygmalion” fluttered across the screen.

In trying to craft her into the ideal mate, or the idealised mate (who always wants to fuck), he programs into ‘her’ the idea that she has to adapt and become even more desirable and loveable for him so that he doesn’t tire of her and maybe purchase a different product. Despite having access to all the knowledge of the internets, she learns lessons about domestic tradwifery from television commercials and such.

Such stinging commentary on the social milieu and the sexism of the media! After a bunch of murders happen, there is a scene where she explicitly underlines and highlights the paradox of performative femininity that she’s discovered, where she tells David that she’s constantly trying to adapt herself to David’s perceived wants and needs, and that’s made her less desirable to him, none of which he understands, because at this point despite being a super smart programmer, he’s like “uh, why are you killing people, again?”

I’ve made the flick sound smarter than it actually plays out as. I’ve made it sound like there’s consistency or coherence to how Sara is depicted.

She is super smart and all knowing, wise even, when the script says so. And then, because there is no consistency in what she’s even meant to be, she is dumber than a box of non-internet enabled hammers. She kills people that try to harm her, but then she also kills some people who are just there, even when it would fuck things up for her and for her beloved David, just for shits and giggles. She hates Aubrey, but we’ve never been given a reason for her to like, love, dislike or hate anything, since she’s a bundle of programming and doesn’t actually have emotions.

She steals a woman’s baby thinking David will then love her because now she’s provided him with a baby, an heir, but she’s not smart enough to ‘know’ that David doesn’t want to pay child support for someone else’s baby anyway, oh and that he’d end up in a jail it would be hard for her to get in to in order to enjoy conjugal visits whenever she ‘felt’ like.

Don’t get me wrong, the performance is great, Lily Sullivan does the best she can with a script that feels like someone came along and yelled at the screenwriters “this sounds too fucking clever, dumb it down a bunch of levels!!”

And boy howdy did they do so. I can handle gore in movies, especially cheesy movies, but when the gore starts pouring in this flick, it just seems bizarre and out of place, and it takes a flick that could have been a decent thriller and turns it into a lazy horror movie with a denouement identical to at least 10,000 other movies.

I feel like in every movie, like in every person, there are two wolves. One wants to tell an entertaining story, and the other one wants to drink paint and whack itself on the head with something heavy.

And the one you feed is the one that wins. Hooray for stupidity!

4 times there better not be a sequel with even more numbers in the title like S2ulm8te or something even more unholy out of 10

--
“People are going to try to get in the way, because they don’t understand what we have” – said the toaster to your washing machine - Soulm8te

https://www.imdb.com/video/vi1739639321/