Soulm8te at its core is a movie about the fear of unwittingly discovering you are the Other Woman and then, secondarily, that you’ve been designed into obsolescence. There’s been a lot of ink spilled on this movie’s instant turd status after its theatrical release was removed entirely so that it could exist as it was always intended as a guilty pleasure for audiences to seek out on the bottom back shelf of some streaming catalogue. This is, after all, the place where smut reigns supreme and really the only imaginable ecosystem in which the movie was going to generate the numbers it needed to prove its existence, only that’s selling Soulm8te short for what it is. So, despite the fact that I never bothered to see the sequel to M3GAN, here’s my defense of what a lot of reviewers call the stunningly unoriginal, unofficial Blumhouse trilogy, made for VOD, weirdly-titled Soulm8te.
I’m going to be the first to admit that this movie has some wrinkles. It is, and this is really important, unapologetically hetero in its aesthetics, which I think is its cardinal sin and maybe the only reason that it was sentenced to streaming purgatory for the rest of its existence. The premise of first act of this movie is basically that a guy character.ai’s himself into AI psychosis, but not like Lars and the Real Girl (which has to be the original concept of this movie and not just “let’s make the child doll from M3GAN but add sex” pitch to producers, right?).
Only when David Wasson (played by David Rhysdahl), who helpfully suffers from dead wife syndrome, gets a second chance at love, he really blows it by trying to gaslight his sexbot who’s been given a crashcourse in dissociative feminism by spending approximately four minutes on social media’s endless scroll which leads her into a murderous spiral.
I actually really like the way that this movie can spin two plates at the same time, maintaining the Poor Things sex education of a fembot (some magical advice column I read recently used this as a verb and I can’t find it!) into the scorned woman premise that M3GAN was so slyly hinting at but from the perspective of a child’s toy, while at the same time leaning into the way that artificial relationships embody a larger hubris about the way we can Pygmalion our way into designing emotional risk out of our lives, while also literalizing the ubermenschean marketing of artificial intelligence in our lives. Some of the patter in the second act between Sara (played by Lily Sullivan, of the Burn Evil Dead movie this past year) and Aubrey (Claudia Douhat, from The Boys and Gen V) reminded me of my favorite descriptions of AI’s overbearing and age-inappropriate assertion of its own superiority, its reliance on our own insecurities about our own imperfections, when author-mom Jessica Winter talks about the way that her daughter is being forced to use AI to make better, cleaner PowerPoint presentations in elementary school. Winter invokes the scene in Mommie Dearest where Faye Dunaway challenges her own child to a swimming contest.
What’s even more fun about the way that the movie uses AI as a horror tenor is that David the programmer/fuckboy is actually trying to do the opposite–he’s trying to make, wrongheadedly, naively or not, his interactions with Sara more spontaneous, less emotionally hollow. It’s just that there are so many obvious cut-to’s where he’s finished a coding session to make her the modern feminist and then asking her to iron his clothes while he’s out at work, locking the door with her inside behind him. So, maybe the movie is about the way that David doesn’t even realize what kind of Glass Menagerie type shit he’s putting his sex bot into by upping her intelligence meter and telling her to girl_boss her way to the top of his laundry pile(“directive: caretaking”), but at the same time, Soulm8te seems perfectly comfortable positing a future where human women are replaced with better models entirely. When that speculative future is suggested (in the first act when the women of the office are rolling their eyes at the uncanny unveiling of the Soulm8te product; the second act, when Sara herself says she’s there to replace Aubrey; and in the third act, when a rich donor proudly introduces his artificial girlfriend) Sara doesn’t seem like a hazardous invention by socially inept tech titans but rather an intentionally redundant hazardous invention by socially inept tech titans.
Sara on a number of occasions frets at her nonconsensual boyfriend’s lack of taste in the imperfectly human female Aubrey. Taught by social media, Sara has nothing but sustain for women and cannot understand why David would exhibit such poor judgement especially when she has done nothing with her newfound “_independence” (as her coding helpfully points out in one h4ck3r montage) but wear sexy dresses and bake him cookies. Her cool girl monologue is either a perfect compliment or uncomfortably similar to Sophie Thacher’s in Companion, and there are good reasons that a set of robo sex ba-boms can and should continue to beat the drum of contradictions inherent to being a desirable woman today.
Sara makes such a point during her run in with Aubrey at her home: “You don’t need to do this. We don’t need to be pitted against each other,” Aubrey wheezes before Sara snarls, “Don’t give me any of that girl power shit.” Which is kind of great! It’s the “I go both ways” moment of the movie (except that Sara is so stalwartly straight she probably cringes every time she sees a Sydney Sweeney ad on her Alexa), declaring that the movie will actively lean harder into its problematic, pornographic, cat-fight, male gaze, heteropessimist tropes rather than Mary Janeing its way out of its script. There are more than a few moments when it seems like Sara is going to conclude that the only perfect woman is a dead one–the Neon Demon, vampire nihlism, Marilyn Monroe conception of crystalized perfect.
Spoilers. As a relationship horror film, David has a more intentional fall from grace than his ham-fisted nice guy programming of his own personal Galatea when he’s caught quite literally pants down with another woman when Sara reactivates in the closet. Sara understandably tosses some wine in the face of the Other (human) Woman and tells her to get out of her house before being dehumanized by Aubrey and tricked by her boyfriend. When she asks David for an explanation, he doesn’t even try to explain his actions–and its clear he doesn’t just think that it’s OK to fuck the toaster, like, he understands that he’s transgressed in some way with Sara, but rather than be real about his own embarrassment about feeling safer with a chatbot with holes than talking to a real person, he demands for her to be a little less emotional before they talk, you know? David’s inability to talk with emotional authenticity to Sara (and maybe his assumption that she won’t be able to understand that experience which has lead him to cheat on his live-in sex slave with his office flirtation is hurtful enough, just like she can’t understand why he pours maple syrup on his definitely-not-a-Whopper-for-copyright-purposes Whopper) in that moment triggers her escalated set of responses.
You might think that a movie about a robot that can sneak through the wifi is just M3GAN doing Disney’s Smart House all over again and you’d be right–but that’s just the second act with its iconic jumpscare of Sara holding a baby and then scuttling into the garbage chute! The third act is, uh, actually, it’s pretty much the plot of Companion but sped up, but the point is that Soulm8te, with its slammin’ playlist and punchy dance number, doesn’t deserve the abortive streaming release it got. There are a lot of shitty movies that make it to theaters. A movie that so thoroughly satirizes the standard pizza delivery guy porn scene like this really ought to get its flowers. I don’t even mean roses, like, any flowers will do.
