After a ruthless tech giant acquires his company, a grieving engineer is tasked with testing their new AI companion. But when he attempts to program her to be a truly sentient soulmate, she develop...
Did any of us really expect M3GAN to blow up in popularity this much that it would spawn a franchise? Probably not, but that just shows how elusive the filthy greens can be, and how fast Hollywood will chase them off a cliff. I’m even more shocked that we were even able to get to this point at all because I was not kind to M3GAN 2.0 last year—not by a long shot. A complete 180-degree corkscrew splash away from what made the first film insightful and entertaining, it seemed almost aggressively uninterested in any qualities that earned the first one its audience outside of upping its absurdity through another genre. It bombed so badly that the planned spinoff “Soulm8te” got completely shelved from being released in theaters before being heartlessly dumped onto streaming mere days ago with no fanfare.
Well…..let’s see if that decision was warranted. SPOILER ALERT: it was.
Props to Kate Dolan for putting one step forward and barely looking back with her direction; she knew exactly the type of movie this looked like on paper and in practice, and she was determined to squeeze as much personality through the cracks as she viably could….albeit to little avail. Still, it shows confidence on her part, at least, and a lived-in intentionality that adapts the general scrappiness and lurid pop from the franchise’s DNA without needing to completely give itself over to it. In a day and age where it’s borderline required to wear your influences on your sleeves because derivation is its own selling point, Dolan treating this as a work-for-hire in only her second directorial outing shows restraint that isn’t needed but was probably required.
Susie Collins does a serviceable job of grounding this sleek, cold aesthetic in something that feels tactile and real. Her production design sports the tech-infused domestic style that mirrors the techno-horror corporate trappings befitting of the franchise it’s attached to, morphing it into the closest thing toward a fully realized domestic sphere; we got a middle ground now between pastel-colored houses and neatly trimmed minimalist or maximalist interiors reinforcing isolation and overexposure. It’s pretty up-to-date to the circumstances of our current reality and environment without going overboard on the spectacle and being mindful of the story’s scope and scale……but the atmosphere is something it can’t really lock onto.
You want the definition of a visually polished yet hollow assembly line? Just look at this film’s presentation. There are clear rumbling undercurrents of a retro ‘80s or ‘90s erotic thriller in here somewhere to where it at least justifies it's "erotic thriller" label, but the development of such discomfort never quite matches the payoff we’re given. It’s a shame since the technical elements here are of the standard you’d expect from a cinematic release rather than something sent straight to streaming, at least at face value; Narayan Van Maele has this clean, lacquered, almost antiseptic gloss to his cinematography, every shot framed with technical competence, cold, recessed lighting and a controlled framework that keeps you at arm’s length the entire time, like a showroom you’re not allowed to touch anything in.
Compact and concise, although with not much meat on its bones otherwise, John Cutler doesn’t do much beyond the bare minimum to make the editing stand out. And even so, its the dictionary definition of ‘fine’.
Pacing-wise, the energy is very low despite being an hour and thirty-nine minutes long but to its credit, it doesn’t waste any time and gets right to the chase. Following on from the previous two films, visual and practical effects remain pretty stellar in carrying a genuinely disquieting seamlessness, much of the supposed humor lands with all the impact of a polite cough, tension is pigeonholed into a narrative that barely has any of the sort due to its flagrant predictability, meaning urgency gets kneecapped and simply doesn’t show up, and many of the kill scenes (all three of them) are well-staged but evaporate from memory the moment they’re over. Surprisingly, all of this ties into the biggest noose around the movie’s neck: the disconnected tone itself. Grim, grounded, and restrained to a fault, this is the third time a movie within the M3GAN universe has pulled a disappearing act by swapping genres, and while I can see the value behind the switch, it effectively creates a polarizing seesaw. It doesn’t pretend it has to be another M3GAN movie so leaning into a more traditional semi-psychological register made it easier to take seriously….but even I have to point out that the M3GAN universe runs on a specific frequency of gleeful, self-aware lunacy, and if dialing it up to 11 for M3GAN 2.0 didn’t reinvent the wheel, you can bet your ass stripping it out here doesn’t work much either.
Anthony Willis’s score is actually a pretty decent somber hybrid of classical and pop-techno and unlike his work on Wuthering Heights, it actively fits the general vibe and imposing melancholic underlay that encompasses the entire project. P.K Hooker’s sound design helps offset the film’s clinical sterility despite being mostly half-hearted, the costume design from Gwen Jeffares Hourie rounds out the minimalist contemporary aesthetic everywhere except Sara, whose wardrobe is the one place it actually earns its keep, and for once, we actually got an R-rating here, extending explicitly to the gore and nudity. Both M3GAN movies are rated PG-13, by the way, so it’s actually kinda refreshing to see them not hold back on violence…..even if the gore isn't that special.
Look, there’s a broader conversation to be had about whether any cast, no matter how game or genuinely talented, could have threaded this particular needle—and to their modest credit, this one comes closer and feels more game for it than the material deserves—but they can only do so much shuffling and wrestling about to salvage the narrow, needlelike, ultrathin construction of their characters. All of them are jostled down to a broadly two-dimensional level and many relationships are left underwritten despite their supposed importance to the emotional stakes, especially with dialogue this rote and first base that veers into the sanctimonious on multiple fronts.
Lily Sullivan does not play her character any differently from the likes of Sophie Thatcher in Companion and Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina….but for what she’s been given, it’s still comfortably the best performance here. An enjoyably stiff performance that gradually gets looser upon her emotional evolution, there’s a semi-unsettling physical precision she brings to the central role. Claudia Doumit brings enough humanity to her role, arguably harboring a much better screen presence than most despite her character lacking a fifth of the complexity she gave to Victoria Neuman from The Boys, and David Rysdahl essentially has to be a chameleon to carry two contradictory registers at once: a grieving, sympathetic widower hollowed out by loneliness, and just another anonymous creep who would buy and remake women out of circuits because it’s the only way he can control said loneliness. Granted, it doesn’t go all the way on the latter, but he plays the part well.
Apparently, somebody behind the extensive writing team caught a sneak peek at the bloated cluster grenade that M3GAN 2.0 was gonna torpedo everybody in within a $39.1 million mile-long radius and decided “Yeah, we’re not doing that”. So everything in this narrative has been emailed, faxed, and shipped from screenwriting factory 101, which depending on your preference is either a godsend or the stamp of death. Rummaging through the attic of ‘80s and ‘90s erotic thriller clichés and tropes and coming up with the most dog-eared, water-damaged copies, it leans on a narrative so formulaic it reads like a rough draft nobody bothered to revise, and for a premise like this—one that plays very matter-of-factly with many real-world stories we see regularly about people developing bizarre and intimate relationships with AI chatbots—it’s not really that shocking anymore. If you've seen one of these 'companion-robots-goes-on-a-killing-spree' movies, then you’ve essentially already watched this. Indulging in the same hackneyed tropes it thinks it’s critiquing, whatever sassy self-awareness it thinks it has applies only to basic lampshading, and because it makes the mistake of telling the story from the least interesting perspective, all attempts at unconventional instincts go straight out the window.
It’s not that I’m opposed to a movie not having any curveballs or staying predictable throughout, but this leaves all of its bones out on the stones to pick them clean of any meat that could make it sustainable. All we end up getting are tired platitudes and characters whose decision-making skills would embarrass a malfunctioning toaster.
Nearly all of Soulm8te’s ideas begin and end through wafer-thin gesturing toward questions about the quick-and-dirty exploitation of casual sexism, consent, emotional manipulation through persuasive smart devices, corporate irresponsibility, and the ethics of advanced AI….without really examining any of them in meaningful detail; it just plays them completely straight. The light commentary has very little to add to what we already know; the opening scene alone hands the film a golden ticket toward meaningful discussions on AI companionship replacing human connection—and squanders it completely, which stings, because I can relate to that premise more than I’d like to admit. For people like myself, it is still heartbreakingly difficult to maintain a conversation with somebody longer than a few minutes and sure, it’s hard to argue with the appeal of a computing system fulfilling your every desire, especially if it’s learning things about you that you never realized you desired or appreciated about yourself. But I would not trade my stilted attempts at human interaction for the world, and I wish the film went to greater lengths to grasp onto that emotional clarity and keep it. Considering the thematic substance here focuses on grief, loneliness, and the seductive appeal of a perfectly tailored connection, tying that to the idea of an AI becoming possessive through negligence or misunderstood human emotion carries tremendous potential; hell, the first M3GAN technically already showed us what would happen when someone attempts to replace emotional loss with artificial companionship.
What separates this from M3GAN, though, is that M3GAN might’ve committed to its tone, but it committed to its story with just as much conviction. M3GAN was constructed in the first place because Gemma needed a babysitter; she wasn’t interested nor emotionally equipped to take care of Cady and was forced to step in when M3GAN started killing, and Cady began acting out. Again, it was a classic cautionary tale about the dangers of letting technology raise your kids without guardrails, and it followed through with that idea all the way to the end. “Companion” from last year used the technophobia as a jab toward toxic relationships. “I, Robot” was very subtle in explaining how robots wouldn’t know what to do with technology when they got it. “Blade Runner” was about our refusal to accept other kinds of life. This film gives us no sharper edge, instead landing squarely within the same disposable territory as Megan Fox’s Subservience where making the “robot girlfriend” the victim and humanity the real menace was apparently too difficult to make in a day and age where 9 times out of 10, we’re responsible for giving birth to our own age of extinction!
It’s just regressive.
This is the kind of film that rewards low expectations and punishes high ones, and walking in with the right attitude can make all the difference. Unfortunately, being the stubborn hard-ass I am, its lack of circuitry means while it doesn’t reach for more than what it can hold and delivers nothing more or less than what it promises, you won’t remember a damn thing about this come tomorrow. Nothing about “Soulm8te” feels unfinished, but very little about it feels essential either.
