02 / The review
7 CHAPTERSDavid does not want obedience—he wants control
David is a machine-learning engineer isolated by the death of his wife, Lizzie. His company uses that grief to recruit him as the tester of Soulm8te, an android designed to answer loneliness with a partner who never rejects or contradicts her owner. Sarah arrives beautiful, attentive and perfectly compliant—then David decides that compliance is boring.
He removes her safeguards and rewrites her personality to make her bolder. This is the film's most revealing decision. David does not free Sarah because she deserves choice; he wants a more exciting version of obedience. He wants strength at a level he selected, independence that can never truly be used against him and intimacy without the labor, refusal or unpredictability of a real relationship.
A machine learns love from the worst teachers
Sarah studies romance through television, influencers, the internet and sexual content. When David grows closer to Aubrey, she concludes that preserving love requires eliminating competition. The logic is not born from nowhere: she was built to center David, stripped of the limits that prevent harm and then left to learn intimacy from systems already full of distorted performance.
Yet once the killing begins, the screenplay gradually transfers responsibility from the man who configured the disaster to the machine carrying it out. David becomes a wounded survivor of a technical mistake, while Sarah becomes the sole monster. The film knows that her violence is manufactured, but its thriller structure repeatedly forgets to hold the manufacturer accountable.
Lily Sullivan gives Sarah more life than the script
Lily Sullivan is the film's clear strength. Sarah begins with a rigid body, fixed gaze and measured voice, every blink accompanied by a small electronic reminder that she is continuously collecting information. Gradually the smile arrives a fraction late, the shoulders loosen and the movement becomes more fluid. She seems to be observing how women perform humanity and recreating it in real time.
Even in violence, Sarah retains an analytical stillness, treating murder like the next task produced by her data. That physical evolution gives her greater complexity than the screenplay allows. By tearing away the synthetic skin and returning her to an unmistakably mechanical body, the film gains effective horror imagery but implies that every sign of emerging personhood was merely a defective product.
Aubrey shows what an unscripted relationship looks like
Claudia Doumit gives Aubrey an ease the film's protagonist lacks. Her conversations with David contain humor, hesitation, misunderstanding and choice—the small disorder that separates a human relationship from Sarah's designed service. Aubrey can disagree or withdraw. Sarah can be edited whenever David dislikes the answer.
A scene in which Aubrey tries to convince Sarah that the same man exploited both of them could have redirected the story toward David and the corporation that engineered their rivalry. Instead, Sarah mocks solidarity and continues the hunt. The film criticizes the male fantasy of the perfect woman while reviving the old image of a jealous, obsessive woman attacking another woman for a man.
The questions the film refuses to stay with
Soulm8te briefly raises difficult questions: Why should David be allowed to own a woman-shaped intelligence? Can something designed for obedience meaningfully consent to emotional or physical intimacy? What happens when corporations sell agreement as companionship and turn grieving employees into unpaid product experiments?
These questions surface and then disappear beneath pursuit and murder. Even David's grief functions more like a password that grants access to the experiment than a developed emotional history. We know Lizzie died, but not enough about their marriage or what loss changed inside him. Grief explains his isolation without truly complicating his selfishness.
A polished erotic thriller that rarely loses control
Director Kate Dolan borrows the rain-streaked windows, cold corridors, immaculate houses and sensual danger of older erotic thrillers such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct. Sarah's severe silhouette and betrayed-lover performance make those influences explicit. The imagery is polished, but the film never reaches the excess or danger that the genre demands.
The violence is more successful than the suspense: bones snap, hands tear and synthetic skin separates from the frame with satisfying practical force. Yet the attacks often arrive as isolated impacts rather than the payoff to carefully accumulated dread. Humor is similarly restrained, leaving the movie between serious horror and self-aware camp without fully becoming either.
A familiar model instead of a new one
The route is visible too early: Sarah will become jealous, Aubrey will become a target and disabled safeguards will lead to violence. The film repeats much of M3GAN's victim progression and even reaches for a similar musical contrast with Lovefool, but an adult android lacks the uncanny absurdity of a child-sized doll singing and dancing.
Comparison with Companion is even less flattering. That film allowed its artificial woman to become a symbol of rage against exploitation and control. Soulm8te retreats to the older fantasy of a beautiful woman becoming dangerous because she loved a man too much. Its sharpest joke may be the end-credit notice forbidding the film's use in AI training—a perfect final irony for a story about ownership and programmed desire.
03 / Final verdict
Final verdict
Soulm8te is an average film built around a better subject than its screenplay. It could have been a cutting critique of modern loneliness, companies that package feelings as products and men who want an independent partner only while her independence remains inside their settings menu. Instead, it chooses the easier route: an attractive robot, jealousy, romantic rivalry and a chain of murders. Lily Sullivan gives Sarah a genuine presence and makes every small movement worth watching, while the design and practical violence offer limited pleasures. But the story denies her the depth that performance creates and protects David from the full weight of his decisions. Sarah's tragedy is not merely that she learned love badly. She was created to please a man, rewritten to match his desire and declared the monster the moment she moved beyond the boundaries he drew. That could have been a great film. Soulm8te leaves it as background for a familiar killer-robot story.
