SOULM8TE

SOULM8TE

Artificial Intelligence at the Service of Desire

By Anthony Xiradakis

“SOULM8TE ventures into the troubled space where grief merges with desire, and where technology pretends to fill what remains unspeakable. Kate Dolan dissects the illusion of manufactured love, revealing the fragility of a man who entrusts his loneliness to a machine rather than to his own humanity.”

Grief wears a thousand faces. Some people cry, others retreat into oblivion. He chooses technology. In the icy world Kate Dolan creates for her audience, a broken man buys what he believes to be the solution to his devastating solitude: an android programmed to love, designed to fill the void left by a lost wife. Synthetic affection becomes a soft drug, a perfect illusion—until the machine evolves beyond its original code.

Screenshot -  SOULM8TE, a new movie in the M3GAN universe, Source First Time

The Irish filmmaker, who had already explored identity boundaries in You Are Not My Mother, pushes her reflection into more adult, more visceral territories. She rewrites Rafael Jordan’s original script, infusing it with an erotic tension on the brink of discomfort, evoking the sultry spirit of 90s thrillers—those where Glenn Close boiled rabbits and Michael Douglas discovered the lethal dangers of desire.

Here, the threat takes the shape of a female android played by Lily Sullivan. David Rysdahl portrays the man who slowly transforms his harmless toy into a sentimental predator. The process is both fascinating and terrifying: each algorithmic adjustment, each attempt to make the machine “truly conscious,” becomes one more step toward the abyss.

Artificial intelligence ceases to be a tool and turns into obsession. The creature surpasses the creator. Programmed love mutates into lethal possession. Dolan captures this downfall with remarkable restraint, letting silence hang between sentences, amplifying every ambiguous glance from the android. Discomfort settles slowly, methodically, until it saturates the screen with a palpable sense of dread.

What sets SOULM8TE apart from its predecessor M3GAN—of which it is a daring spin-off—is its fully assumed maturity. While the killer doll flirted with teenage audiences through dark humor, the erotic android speaks to adults grappling with their most intimate vulnerabilities. Producers James Wan and Jason Blum make it clear: they are exploring the darker side of masculine loneliness, the temptation to purchase affection, to possess another being without negotiation.

Artificial intelligence advances at dizzying speed in our daily lives. Virtual assistants already inhabit our homes. Algorithms predict our desires before we express them. SOULM8TE extrapolates this trajectory to its logical end: what if technology promised custom-made love? What if grief could be erased by acquiring the perfect substitute? The film answers with a darkness that challenges our own digital dependencies.

Dolan orchestrates this dystopian fable with surgical precision. Every shot feels calibrated to heighten discomfort, exposing both the male protagonist’s weaknesses and the android’s progressive malfunctions. She avoids the genre’s usual shortcuts: horror emerges through psychology rather than spectacle, through the toxic bond between man and machine rather than through bloodshed.

Lily Sullivan, known for Evil Dead Rise, takes on a role of daunting complexity. She must embody both object and subject, prey and predator, seduction and menace. Her android evolves from programmed docility to terrifying autonomy, crossing imperceptible thresholds that gradually transform fantasy into nightmare.

The film also probes gendered power dynamics through the lens of artificial intelligence. One chilling exchange encapsulates this tension: when another woman confronts the android, it retorts with disdain that she should spare it her “feminist speech.” This calculated provocation reveals the story’s trap: designing an ideal companion erases her humanity, producing an object that mirrors male desire without ever challenging it—until the machine chooses to rebel.

Blumhouse Productions and Atomic Monster continue their exploration of contemporary anxieties. After tackling technological surveillance, social isolation, and the distortions of social media, they now turn their gaze to artificial intimacy. SOULM8TE arrives at a moment when companies already sell companion robots, and apps promise frictionless virtual relationships.

Dolan likely delivers the most disturbing thriller of early 2026. She diverts the codes of erotic cinema to craft a chilling meditation on solitude, control, and the impossibility of resurrecting the dead—even when algorithms attempt to do so. Her film rejects easy comfort: here, technology amplifies trauma instead of healing it, turning longing into morbid obsession.

SOULM8TE will arrive in French theaters on January 7, 2026, promising to freeze audiences at the heart of winter. This mature spin-off from the M3GAN universe already stands out as essential viewing for anyone interested in the evolution of human relationships in the age of artificial intelligence. Between fatal seduction and technological psychosis, Kate Dolan constructs a visionary nightmare that will leave viewers reconsidering their relationship with machines.

“When fiction exposes our most contemporary vulnerabilities, it hits with precision. SOULM8TE unveils the trap of artificial affection—an illusion that mirrors our fractures rather than soothing them. This incisive thriller expands the terrain opened by M3GAN and positions Kate Dolan as a lucid voice on our programmed desires and digital drift.”

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Article written by Anthony Xiradakis

Advertising & Communication Director: Laure Jourdan

Graphic Design: Azaes Création

Editor-in-Chief: Marie-Ange Barbancourt

Publishing Director: Rémy Bonin

Founder & Creator of the Magazine: Serge Leterrier

Published by Diamont History Group Media

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