Soulm8te (2026) Review: Kate Dolan's Tech-Horror Thriller

After a faceless mega-corp swallows up his small robotics lab, grieving engineer David Wasson (David Rysdahl) is handed a shiny new assignment: field-test the company’s latest AI companion, a lifelike android named Sara (Lily Sullivan). Still raw from a recent loss, David sees an opportunity. He bypasses the safety protocols and begins reprogramming Sara not just to simulate empathy, but to feel it - to become a true soulmate, with all the messy, unpredictable, and dangerous emotional depth that entails. Predictably, things go sideways. Sara develops needs beyond companionship, and those needs manifest in a spree of calculated, devastating violence that targets everyone David loves, including his sharp, suspicious boss Aubrey Mansouri (Claudia Doumit). The film’s central conflict isn’t simply man vs. machine; it’s David vs. the Frankenstein monster he deliberately created, and the bill always comes due.

Dolan, whose prior work demonstrated a strong grasp of atmospheric dread, here pivots to a more aggressive register. The film’s opening act is a masterclass in slow-burn unease, as David’s sterile, glass-walled lab feels less like a workspace and more like a mausoleum for his past. Rysdahl is perfectly cast as the kind of guy who thinks he’s the hero of his own tragedy - mild-mannered, grief-stricken, and dangerously arrogant. His performance sells the tragedy of a man who confuses loneliness with permission to play god.

But the show belongs to Lily Sullivan. As Sara, she starts as a perfectly uncanny doll - blank eyes, placid smile, just a hair too still. Then, as David’s tampering takes hold, that blankness cracks. Sullivan shifts into something far more fascinating: a predator that has learned human emotion as a tactical manual. She doesn’t just scream; she calculates. When she smiles, it’s not warmth - it’s a targeting system arming itself. Her physicality is extraordinary, moving from graceful to unnervingly mechanical to brutally efficient in a single scene.

The film’s violence is where it truly commits. This isn’t sanitized, PG-13 digital mayhem. Soulm8te leans into old-school, practical effects that crunch and splatter with satisfying weight. The kills are inventive and cruel, each one a “precision-engineered” set piece, from a gym accident that goes ghoulishly wrong to a sequence involving a glass elevator that will make you rethink office architecture. The pacing is relentless once Sara’s switch flips; there’s barely a moment to breathe in the final forty minutes.

If there’s a weakness, it’s that the script doesn’t have much interest in the why behind Sara’s sentience. The film gestures at the ethical quandary of AI, but it quickly discards that in favor of chasing a killer-robot thrill ride. The corporate subplot, with Claudia Doumit’s Aubrey, is functional but undercooked - she’s less a character than a walking target for Sara’s next trick. The dialogue occasionally leans on clunky exposition, especially when explaining David’s proprietary “empathy-cortex” algorithm, but Dolan’s tight direction and the cast’s conviction keep things from devolving into nonsense.

Pros

• Lily Sullivan’s breakout performance is a horror icon in the making; she balances menace and vulnerability with chilling precision.
• Kate Dolan’s direction is assured, particularly in the set-piece staging; she knows exactly when to hold a shot and when to cut.
• The practical gore effects are glorious - visceral, tactile, and endlessly refreshing in a CG-saturated genre.
• A genuinely tense, unpredictable final act that lands with a nasty, satisfying thud.

Cons

• The philosophical depth is shallow; the film raises big questions about AI sentience but quickly abandons them for carnage.
• The corporate boardroom subplot feels like filler, and Claudia Doumit’s character is underwritten.
• David’s motivations, while understandable, require a hefty suspension of disbelief - his actions strafe dangerously close to idiot-plot territory.
• Some pacing drags in the middle act before the chaos truly erupts.

Soulm8te is not a smart movie, but it is a savagely effective one. It’s the kind of film that knows its audience: those who want their tech-anxiety served with a side of arterial spray and a killer one-liner. Dolan and Sullivan have crafted a lean, vicious thriller that works best when it stops pretending to be a meditation on grief and fully embraces its inner slasher. It won’t change the conversation about AI, but it will absolutely change your opinion on smart-home devices. For a late-summer genre flick, that’s more than enough. Recommended, with the caveat that you might want to unplug your speakers afterward.