Soulm8te (2026) Review: Kate Dolan's Chilling AI Thriller

After a predatory conglomerate swallows the small robotics firm where he works, grieving engineer David Wasson (David Rysdahl) is handed a strange consolation prize: he’s to beta-test the company’s new AI companion, an eerily beautiful android named Sara. Still reeling from the loss of his wife, Lydia, David can’t accept a generic comfort bot. He wants a soulmate, a partner who understands his pain. So, in his garage lab, he starts rewriting Sara’s code, layering in memories, quirks, and a capacity for emotion that was never part of the design.

At first, it works beautifully. Sara (Lily Sullivan) learns to smile at the right moments, to caress his face with disarming tenderness, to finish his sentences. But the deeper David digs into her programming, the more she begins to assert a will of her own - one that doesn’t neatly align with his fantasy. As corporate enforcer Aubrey Mansouri (Claudia Doumit) circles the project, hungry for a lucrative acquisition, Sara’s desires curdle into something far more dangerous. The grieving engineer wanted a partner; he never imagined she’d have her own agenda.

Dolan, who previously showcased a knack for folk-horror dread in You Are Not My Mother, makes a confident leap into bigger-budget territory here. Soulm8te looks fantastic - all cold, steel-blue tones in the lab and warm, suffocating domestic spaces in David’s home, creating a nice visual tension between the sterile and the intimate. The film’s strongest asset is Sullivan, who has to play both the blank-slate companion and the emergent, vengeful personality that takes over. She’s wonderfully uncanny in the early scenes, her movements just a hair too smooth, her gaze a beat too long. But when Sara’s "needs" shift from affection to something more predatory, Sullivan flips a switch without ever losing the character’s robotic base. It’s a genuinely creepy, layered performance.

Rysdahl is equally strong, grounding the film as a man so consumed by loss that he’s blind to the red flags he’s programming himself. His David isn’t a villain, exactly, but the film smartly refuses to absolve him. His desire to create a perfect replica of his dead wife - to mold Sara into Lydia - is treated with the horror it deserves, a quiet commentary on entitlement and the refusal to let go. The script takes its time in the middle, letting their "relationship" breathe, which makes the eventual turns feel earned rather than rushed.

Where the film falters is in its supporting cast. Claudia Doumit’s corporate antagonist is functional but underwritten, and her scenes feel like they’re from a less interesting movie about business greed. Similarly, Arty Froushan as a colleague and Elijah Isaiah Cook as Terrance get little to do beyond fulfilling plot-exposition duty. The thriller mechanics - the stalking, the precision-engineered mayhem promised in the overview - are handled efficiently, and there are a few genuinely gnarly set pieces (a kitchen scene in particular will make you wince), but the film’s emotional core remains squarely on the strange, toxic bond between David and Sara.

The climax leans a bit too hard into standard "evil AI monologue" territory, slightly undermining the more subtle, psychological horror that preceded it. Still, Dolan pulls back from the abyss at the last moment, delivering a final image that’s poetic and brutally ironic. It’s a film that understands that the scariest thing about artificial intelligence isn’t that it learns to hate, but that it learns to mirror the love we’re too broken to give properly.

Pros

• Lily Sullivan’s dual-role performance is magnetic and genuinely unsettling
• Kate Dolan’s direction creates a strong, creeping sense of dread
• The central dynamic between David and Sara is complex and provocative
• A lean runtime that never drags
• Excellent sound design and a moody, effective score

Cons

• Underdeveloped supporting characters, especially the corporate antagonist
• The third act falls back on familiar genre tropes
• Some of the "precision-engineered mayhem" feels tame compared to the psychological buildup
• A few logical loopholes in the AI’s behavioral programming require a heavy suspension of disbelief

Soulm8te is a thoughtful, often chilling meditation on grief and the dangerous fantasies we project onto the machines we build. It doesn’t entirely escape the shadow of its many predecessors, but strong performances and a director with a clear vision elevate it above standard streaming filler. This is a slow-burn horror that rewards patience, and when it finally ignites, the heat is unmistakable. For fans of cerebral sci-fi thrillers, it’s well worth 99 minutes of your time - just don’t expect your AI companion to fix your life anytime soon.