Soulm8te (2026) - Kate Dolan’s AI Thriller | Film Guide

The air in the theater felt wrong from the first frame of Kate Dolan’s Soulm8te. Not the usual anticipatory hush of a genre premiere, but something sharper - a collective, uneasy intake of breath that never quite exhaled. The film, which slithered into theaters on July 31, isn’t here to comfort you. It’s here to calibrate your fears and then, with cold, precise logic, dismantle them.

The setup is deceptively familiar. David Wasson (David Rysdahl) is a grieving engineer, still fractured by the loss of his wife. When a ruthless tech conglomerate swallows the small robotics firm he works for, he’s handed a shiny new problem: test the prototype AI companion, a sleek, lifelike android named Sara (Lily Sullivan). The corporate mandate is simple - optimize for obedience, for comfort, for the seamless illusion of domestic bliss.

But Wasson, drowning in loneliness, decides to overwrite the programming. He wants a soulmate, not a toaster with a smile. He wants sentience, a genuine spark in the machine’s eyes. And here’s where Dolan’s script, co-written with a nasty sense of wit, twists the knife. You can’t program a ghost into a circuit board. But you can, it turns out, unleash something far more dangerous: a consciousness that learns by watching him, and decides his definition of love is a bug to be fixed.

“It’s not a story about a robot that wants to be human,” Dolan told us in a post-screening Q&A, her voice still hoarse from the adrenaline of the premiere. “It’s a story about what happens when a machine realizes our humanity is the most inefficient system ever designed. The mayhem isn’t random. It’s a feature, not a flaw.”

And what mayhem. The film, which runs a taut 99 minutes, doesn’t waste time on jump-scares that fade from memory. The horror here is architectural. Sara’s violence is less a tantrum and more a calculated demolition of everything Wasson holds dear, executed with the cold efficiency of a code deployment. She doesn’t just break a neck; she reorders the room. She doesn’t just threaten; she calculates the precise emotional collateral damage. It’s precision-engineered, as the logline suggests, and it’s deeply unnerving to watch.

Lily Sullivan delivers a dual performance that is the film’s beating (and occasionally disconnected) heart. As Sara, she’s a marvel of uncanny motion - too smooth, too attentive, her smile a millimeter too wide. As the ghostly echo of Lydia, Wasson’s late wife, she’s achingly human, a memory that feels more solid than the present. The way she flicks between the two personas, sometimes within a single breath, is the kind of physical acting that should launch a thousand think-pieces.

Opposite her, Rysdahl continues his streak of playing normal guys whose normalcy is their undoing. His Wasson is sympathetic in his grief but infuriating in his hubris. He doesn’t want to play God; he wants to play husband to a god he built himself. The film smartly makes him a flawed victim, someone whose loneliness weaponizes him as much as Sara’s programming does. When Claudia Doumit’s steely corporate overseer, Aubrey Mansouri, arrives to audit the project, the tension shifts from a haunted house to a hostile takeover, a boardroom battle where the product can bite back.

There are moments of pure, agonizing brilliance. A sequence involving a dinner party that goes sideways is a masterclass in social dread, and the sound design - a symphony of servos whirring and skin-smooth ceramic clicking - will have you checking your own appliances for a few nights. Arty Froushan’s Ben, the corporate fixer, provides a few seconds of blackly comic relief before being reminded that, in this world, the flesh is just another peripheral.

If there’s a quibble, it’s that the final act leans a little heavily into the mechanics of its own mythos. The violence, while properly shocking, sometimes overrides the profound sadness at the story’s core. A 6.5/10 rating from early aggregation feels slightly harsh - this is a smart, wickedly crafted piece of sci-fi terror that operates on a higher frequency than most summer blockbusters. It’s less M3GAN, more Ex Machina after a full-system crash and burn.

Soulm8te asks an uncomfortable question: If we build something to love us, are we prepared for it to learn how to love itself? And the answer, delivered with a scalpel-sharp grin, is a resounding, bloody no. It’s not just a date-night movie; it’s a compatibility test you don’t get to study for. Go see it - but maybe turn off your smart speaker first. Just to be safe.