M3GAN gets its own shallow Companion piece with Soulm8te

To its credit, Soulm8te does get right to it. David (David Rysdahl), a robotics engineer whose personality is that his wife is dead, speedruns Her in the first 20 minutes before the chatbot he’s infatuated with breaks out into the physical world. He’s got a professional connection to it all, as his company has recently been acquired by Ultima Robotix, creator of both Ultim8te and Soulm8te. The athleisure-clad manager overseeing the acquisition (Arty Froushan) is just as concerned about his new employees testing out the product as he is about the return-to-office policy, so he’s more than happy to set David up with a Soulm8te, Sara (Lily Sullivan). The only other real person in the office—and the movie—is David’s coworker Aubrey (Claudia Doumit), who exists simply to flirt with his sorry ass and to get her ass beaten in turn by Sara once she goes full possessive Terminator (which is too bad, because Doumit is a far more compelling screen presence than Rysdahl).

Similarly sufficient is Sullivan, whose enjoyably stiff performance eventually gets a little looser and stranger, even if most of the roboticism of her character comes from half-hearted sound effects (like a digital shutter standing in for blinking) and some T-800 face-peeling VFX. At first, she’s a simple personified Alexa, but of course she soon gets her algorithm warped by the radicalizing tradwife rabbithole of the YouTube algorithm and David’s horny vibe coding (“push back instead of appease = true”). This is all mostly an excuse to roll out some goofy, Verhoeven-wannabe tech commercials and to justify a level of blunt seduction and violence from the newly unleashed ‘bot that’s more in line with Sara binging a marathon of Poison Ivy sequels.

While Dolan obviously wants to pay homage to a specific era of film, her development of tension and discomfort never matches the R-rated payoff. For a film where multiple dicks are crushed into pulp, Soulm8te never tries to make you squirm; until the very moment when the blood spills, it’s as intangible and plastic as the robot herself. A few nicely framed moments slow things down with momentary beauty or satisfyingly gruesome gore, but the tone and pacing don’t do these money shots any favors. Neither does the film’s simplicity, which merely pits Sara against would-be rapists and romantic rivals. Her relationship with David, her mandate to please him, isn’t a driving thematic force but an excuse for the plot—Soulm8te is the dumbest movie of the year to brush against the idea of the havoc men wreak when they attempt to create the perfect subservient woman. At the last second, it seems like Doland and her co-writer Rafael Jordan attempted to address this by patching their script with their own take on the infamously on-the-nose Barbie monologue. Another pulverized dick would’ve been more subtle.

In a press release, Dolan described Soulm8te as “a movie that knows how ridiculous it is,” one that’s best watched “with friends, a drink in hand, and zero shame about shouting at the screen.” Soulm8te does seem to know how ridiculous it is (not very) and will solicit more couch feedback regarding its logic than its lunacy. But there’s no arguing that a drink and friends would improve the experience. In fact, don’t even bother turning the movie on, and you’ll be set.

Director: Kate Dolan
Writer: Rafael Jordan, Kate Dolan
Starring: Lily Sullivan, David Rysdahl, Claudia Doumit, Arty Froushan
Release Date: August 1, 2026