Now here’s a film I never thought would see the light of day. After the box office failure of M3GAN 2.0, Kate Dolan’s Soulm8te was shelved indefinitely, giving up its theatrical release date and entering postproduction limbo. But then, just a few weeks ago, Blumhouse released a new trailer for the film, announcing that it would drop on VOD before hitting streamers. Now the film is finally available to watch, which raises the most important question: did Dolan and her film deserve their inglorious death? It turns out that will depend a bit on your appreciation for ‘90s VHS smut.
After the loss of his wife, computer programmer David (David Rysdahl) isolates himself from the people around him, only resurfacing when his company enforces a return-to-office mandate. When his new boss – never one to pass up a cross-sell opportunity – offers David a free subscription to the company’s award-winning chatbot product, David decides that talking about his loss with an AI might be preferable than suffering in silence.
It works. Soon David is reliant on his chatbot companion for companionship, and jumps at the opportunity to upload his chatbot into the company’s new Soulm8te animatronic. Before long, Sara (Lily Sullivan) exists in the real world, and with a few lines of code alteration, David is able to create an artificial intelligence that features its own wants and desires. Unfortunately, when David becomes a little too close with coworker Aubrey (Claudia Doumit), those “wants and desires” might just include murder.
Stay in touch
Sign up for our free newsletter
How you feel about a movie is often based on context. Accept the pre-release narrative that Soulm8te is a mess – a would-be spinoff of the M3GAN franchise that tries to blend campy horror with science fiction – and odds are you’ll find what you’re looking for. While the film offers a few smart ideas about chatbots and the false intimacy technology can offer lonely people, much of the film’s final act is a mishmash of bad special effects and paper-thin characterization. Soulm8te struggles most when it follows closest in its predecessors’ footsteps, and the final showdown between David and Sara is a dimly lit facsimile of better films.
I mean, if you’re looking for films that earnestly explore the intersections of artificial intelligence, sex, and power, both Companion and Ex Machina are right there.
But there’s another narrative to consider, that of Soulm8te as an homage to erotic thrillers of the 1990s. Here things get more interesting. In interviews, Dolan has been explicit in comparing her film to a very specific flavor of cinema, and those touches are everywhere in the final feature. David’s warehouse loft evokes a very specific period of urban renewal; once you see the similarities between the space and Glenn Close’s apartment in Fatal Attraction, you cannot unsee them. At the same time, Anthony Willis’s score offers a playful modernization of Showtime or HBO soundtracks, threading a needle between modern synthetics and noir-adjacent orchestrations.
A lot of credit goes to Sullivan, who is given the thankless job of walking between two worlds in her performance. Sullivan gives Sara a husky rasp – an affectation she maintains for the entire film, god help her voice – that evokes the kind of femme fatale you might once have found on R-rated VHS tapes. But she also gives Sara a stiffness to everything that does that underscores her lack of humanity. It’s a tricky balancing act, and one that is easy to overlook in the moment. But it also feels like a performance that could grow in our estimation in time, as writers better versed in erotic thrillers than I begin to tease out the connections between Soulm8te and its inspirations.
The highlight of the film takes place in a karaoke club, where Sara surprises David with a soulful (“soulful”) rendition of The Cardigans’s “Love Fool.” Switching from slow jazz to bubbly pop, Sara whips the crowd to a frenzy as she serenades her creator. A lot is happening in this scene: on the surface, Sara is confessing her synthetic obsession with David, but Sullivan’s choreography while she sings might as well serve as the film’s entire manifesto. Sara’s moves are a bland recreation of sensuality, perfectly in rhythm but lacking any kind of interiority or personalization for the number. For a few brief shining moments, the erotic thriller and the treatise on artificial intelligence align, and Soulm8te shines.
Is Soulm8te a mediocre mashup of voyeurism and technology? Or is it a clever recreation of films that often exploited and sometimes empowered? The answer, as always, probably lies somewhere in the middle. Time might be kind to Soulm8te, especially as much of modern entertainment continues to circle the drain of puritanism. Here’s hoping neither Dolan nor Sullivan find themselves in Hollywood jail for the failures of the M3GAN franchise. Good or bad, they really did try something here, and that’s gotta be worth something. [3/5]
