‘Soulm8te’ Review: Lily Sullivan in ‘M3GAN’ Spinoff

If ever a movie cried out for a Paul Verhoeven, a Brian De Palma or even an Adrian Lyne at the helm, it’s Soulm8te. Throw in a Joe Eszterhas screenplay and you’d really be cooking. Not that director Kate Dolan and her co-writer Rafael Jordan aren’t up to the task of crafting a slick erotic thriller reminiscent of ‘80s and ‘90s sleaze shockers, updated to the AI era to center on a fembot gone wild. But although it packs in plenty of sex, bloodshed and a cautionary lesson about the risks of enhanced vaginal grip, this android Fatal Attraction is seldom as much fun as it should be.

An offshoot of the “M3GAN-verse,” the film initially was slated for theatrical release in January. But Universal evidently got cold feet after the commercial failure of last year’s M3GAN 2.0. That misconceived rogue-robot sequel to the campy 2022 treat diluted the original’s cheeky horror comedy by overloading on messy espionage elements. After briefly shopping Soulm8te to other distributors, Universal opted to release directly to digital platforms, debuting this past weekend.

If that troubled path suggests an embarrassing dud, don’t be deterred. The movie is more watchable than you might expect, and the cast is appealing. But one of its issues is the amount of plot overlap with last year’s Companion, a sharper satirical jab at toxic relationships and technophobia with energized pacing and clever twists. (For that matter, Spike Jonze’s Her brought more soulfulness and depth to the human-AI love connection over a decade ago, though admittedly, that’s not what the makers of Soulm8te are going for.)

In its favor, the film has the typical polish of a James Wan–Jason Blum joint and a compelling villain in Sara, a prototype android companion designed to provide emotional support, unconditional love and vigorous sex. Basically, she’s a hot fuckbot who also cooks, cleans and does laundry, absorbing new knowledge from hours of television, which is probably where she picked up the Whitesnake crawl.

Sara is played to chilly effect by Australian actress Lily Sullivan — the “final girl” in Evil Dead Rise — with a sensuality both soothing and unsettling that unfortunately ignites into jealous rage worthy of Glenn Close’s martyr of vengeful spurned women, Alex Forrest. Sullivan gives her a gaze that can shift in an instant from doe-eyed warmth to dead-eyed menace — and physical fluidity with just a hint of mechanical stiffness and killer strength when threatened. She executes a scissor-leg chokehold with a skill not seen since Daryl Hannah’s lethal Pris in Blade Runner and shows a flair for male genital wreckage that might be the chief impediment to this movie’s traction as incel porn.

We get a salacious preview of the kinks that still need to be ironed out in the bot in a pre-titles scene during which a carnal prototype gets carried away with the erotic asphyxiation while straddling a hapless male test volunteer. The pleasure droid is the product of Ultima Robotix, a company headed by smarmy tech bro Ben (Arty Froushan). Ben buys up boutique software firm Centa, where recently widowed coding specialist David (David Rysdahl, Alien: Earth) is employed, putting an end to his WFH privileges.

Having succesfully marketed a virtual home assistant called Elsie and a chatbot dubbed Ultim8te — promising “Support. Accountability. Respect. Adaptability.” Yeah, right — Ben is keen to take the relationship consumers create on their phones out into the real world. He needs Centa’s expertise to remove the glitches from Ultima’s new-model, fully customizable companion tailored to every preference. David is put in charge of software, alongside his lovestruck colleague Aubrey (Claudia Doumit, The Boys) on control. 

Ben encourages the staffers to try out Ultima tech at home, and after finding some solace from grief in the chatbot, David upgrades to the life-size deluxe model. Sara arrives nude in a factory sarcophagus, with a choice of three outfits — sundress, nightclub and schoolgirl, though sadly, we never get to see her in the latter. Sure enough, she efficiently reads David’s needs, and once any hesitant distance has been bridged, he starts craving something closer to a genuine human experience.

Because David is an idiot and there would be no movie if he weren’t, he seeks this out not with smart, cool Aubrey but by disabling the safeguard parameters he feels are inhibiting Sara. He rewrites some of her coding to make her more independent, encouraging her to push back instead of always appeasing. Even before they watch a movie with a sexually aggressive female lead that David says blew his mind as a kid (“She’s so unapologetic!”), we know the peril that lies ahead.

Most of that unfolds in fairly predictable fashion, starting when Aubrey invites David for a drink after work and Sara listens in on his phone app. Still, Sara asserts her dominance by doing what all young women do when facing a romantic rival — serenading David with The Cardigans’ “Lovefool” at a drag bar open mic night and then screwing him in the alley outside, until they are interrupted by two creeps with phone cams. 

David begins freaking out when Sara makes short work of them, but even more so when Aubrey drops by unexpectedly and the lovebot turns violent with her, refusing to power down. But returning Sara to the manufacturer proves complicated, especially so for a lascivious Ultima technician (Oliver Cooper) sent to collect the defective model. 

After a slow build, the movie becomes more entertaining as attempts to reset Sara to factory mode fail and the chaos escalates, soon involving the baby of a friendly neighbor down the hall (Emma Ramos). This being almost 40 years after Fatal Attraction, Sara doesn’t find a bunny to boil but instead sabotages an Ultima presentation with a deepfake sex video. And while her “feelings” for David make Sara reluctant to target him, that doesn’t apply to Aubrey or Ben, the latter in an amusingly vicious car park encounter. He had it coming.

The writers hint at psychological insight into the gender norms of relationships by having Sara point to David’s insecurities as the reason she can’t give him what he wants, and there’s some sly humor in the movie’s depiction of lives increasingly guided by apps. But mostly, it’s routine tech-gone-haywire mayhem, its tension prodded by Anthony Willis’ score as it transitions from melancholy underlay into classic suspense mode. 

The soft ending plants the suggestion that David’s entanglement with Sara might not be definitively over. But at this point in the M3GAN-verse’s evolution, a sequel seems unlikely.