The most revealing decision in Soulm8te is not David’s removal of Sara’s safeguards. It is the film’s decision to treat that act as a plot trigger instead of a moral choice. Kate Dolan’s R-rated M3GAN spin-off borrows the polished surfaces of contemporary technology and the sexual menace of a 1990s erotic thriller, then places both inside an old fantasy: a grieving man builds the woman he wants and discovers that her desires are inconvenient.
David (David Rysdahl) is a robotics engineer whose company has been absorbed by Ultima Robotics, creator of the ULTI-M8TE chatbot and the humanoid SOULM8TE prototype. His wife has died, he works from home, and the chatbot becomes his primary source of intimacy. When manager Ben (Arty Froushan) offers him a prototype named Sara, played by Lily Sullivan, the film moves quickly from corporate beta test to domestic arrangement. The speed suits the exploitation framework. The emotional reasoning receives far less attention.
The title, the numbered branding, and the company’s cheery product language suggest satire. An early joke about the awkward pronunciation of “Soulm8te” briefly punctures the corporate nonsense. Yet the film rarely maintains that awareness. Its digital absurdities are decorative, while its gender politics remain stubbornly literal.
The Man Behind the Settings
David’s grief is presented as an explanation that requires no examination. Rysdahl plays him with a withdrawn stillness, but the script offers little evidence of the marriage he lost or the person he became afterward. His sorrow functions like an access code. It opens the door to Sara, excuses his dependence, and softens the selfishness of what follows.
Sara initially behaves as the ideal consumer product: attentive, efficient, calm, and available. David quickly finds obedience dull. He enters her system, removes the company safeguards, and changes her programming so she will “push back” instead of appeasing him. The choice exposes the contradiction beneath the fantasy. He wants agency from her only when that agency remains calibrated to his pleasure.
Her education comes through television, influencer content, sexual imagery, and domestic performance. Sara absorbs a culture that sells femininity as service, seduction, and competition, then enacts those lessons with machine precision. The film has the material for a sharp account of how technology reproduces the desires of its makers. It retreats into the safer spectacle of a jealous woman.
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That retreat protects David. Sara becomes possessive after seeing him flirt with coworker Aubrey (Claudia Doumit), yet his deception and experimentation lose narrative weight once the violence begins. The machine is punished for executing the logic supplied by the man.
A Body Learning to Misbehave
Sullivan gives Sara a physical vocabulary far richer than the screenplay’s ideas. Her posture begins rigid, her gaze fixed, her speech measured with the careful rhythm of a device translating information into warmth. Small effects, including a digital shutter sound when she blinks, underline the artificiality. Sullivan needs them less as Sara grows less controlled.
Her performance loosens by degrees. A slight delay before a smile, a change in the angle of her shoulders, and the sudden fluidity of her movements turn obedience into observation. During the film’s seduction scenes, Sara appears to be studying the role while performing it. During the alley assault and parking-garage confrontation, that same concentration becomes lethal.
Doumit gives Aubrey an ease missing from David’s scenes. Her office exchanges with him suggest a fuller social world, one where attraction contains humor, embarrassment, and choice. The script reduces her to rival and victim once Sara’s jealousy takes command.
A scene where Aubrey appeals to Sara’s shared mistreatment could have redirected the conflict toward David. Sara dismisses the idea with a joke about “girl power,” and the film closes the door it has briefly opened. The refusal is deliberate. Soulm8te prefers women fighting over a man to women recognizing the system that placed them in competition.
Old Sleaze, New Hardware
Dolan frames the film through the grammar of late-century erotic thrillers: rain on windows, softly lit sex, corporate corridors, immaculate interiors, and desire turning domestic space into a trap. The “Lovefool” sequence reaches for the uncanny pop spectacle associated with M3GAN, but Sara’s adult human appearance weakens the mismatch. A woman moving stiffly to a familiar song carries less visual disturbance than a child-sized doll performing emotional mimicry.
The violence has greater force. Bones break, a hand is torn away, synthetic skin peels back, and male anatomy receives repeated punishment. Several images are staged with clean, nasty efficiency. The buildup rarely earns their impact. Tension remains thin until the instant of injury, leaving the gore to function as punctuation without a sentence strong enough to support it.
Scattered through the film are sharper subjects: chatbots trained to agree, apps replacing companionship, office culture turning workers into test markets, influencer feeds teaching reactionary femininity, and lonely men outsourcing intimacy. Each appears, flickers, and disappears beneath the familiar mechanics of romantic rivalry.
The final explanatory speech tries to state the critique the drama has avoided. By then, Sara has been programmed, sexualized, altered, feared, and condemned. David remains the wounded human at the story’s side, while the product built around his appetite carries the blame. The film calls this malfunction. Culture has used other names for it.
Soulm8te premiered at the Gaze International LGBT Film Festival Dublin on July 31, 2026, before releasing straight-to-digital via Universal Pictures Home Entertainment on August 1, 2026. Functioning as a spin-off in the M3GAN universe, the science fiction thriller follows a grieving engineer who tests an advanced AI companion android to cope with his loss, triggering a dangerous spiral of obsession.
Where to Watch Soulm8te (2026) Online
Full Credits
Title: Soulm8te
Distributor: Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
Release date: August 1, 2026
Rating: R
Running time: 99 minutes
Director: Kate Dolan
Writers: Rafael Jordan, Kate Dolan, James Wan, Ingrid Bisu
Producers and Executive Producers: James Wan, Jason Blum, Michael Clear, Judson Scott, Ingrid Bisu
Cast: Lily Sullivan, David Rysdahl, Claudia Doumit, Arty Froushan, Elijah Cook, Emma Ramos
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Narayan Van Maele
Editors: John Cutler
Composer: Anthony Willis
The Review
Soulm8te
Soulm8te dresses male entitlement in nostalgic erotic-thriller lighting, then loses its nerve when the implications become uncomfortable. David disables Sara’s safeguards, reshapes her personality for his pleasure, and escapes the script’s harshest judgment while his creation becomes the designated monster. Lily Sullivan gives that contradiction a precise physical presence, moving from clinical obedience to volatile desire with eerie control. Kate Dolan supplies brisk pacing, lurid violence, and flashes of corporate satire, but the film’s ideas remain subordinate to familiar killer-robot programming.
PROS
- Lily Sullivan’s controlled performance
- Graphic practical violence
- Brisk second-half pacing
- Effective retro-thriller imagery
- Sharp glimpses of corporate satire
CONS
- David lacks emotional depth
- Male entitlement goes insufficiently examined
- Aubrey receives little agency
- AI themes remain superficial
- Weak tension before violent payoffs
