Soulm8te Review: Lily Sullivan Stars in an Admirable M3GAN Spinoff Sent Straight to Streaming

Pour one out for the M3GAN cinematic universe, which was found dead shortly after expanding beyond its original animatronic horror inception in early 2022, flatlining with M3GAN 2.0 only three years later. That sequel’s poor critical and commercial reception was apparently enough to leave its intended spinoff Soulm8te temporarily shelved before eventually getting dumped onto PVOD and, now, Hulu. It is a little strange to watch a movie that was presumably designed as another piece of a burgeoning horror universe arrive with so little fanfare, especially when the series itself was still trying to figure out what exactly it wanted to be.

It’s a shame, too, because I actually found M3GAN 2.0 more fun than the original specifically because it was willing to take the material in a different direction, and Soulm8te finds a pretty comfortable middle ground between both approaches. It has the horror-centric DNA of M3GAN while leaning more heavily into the psychological thriller territory of Companion. That is a pretty well-trodden genre at this point, especially with artificial intelligence increasingly impacting basically every aspect of human life, and while I haven’t found any of these movies to be the absolute cream of the crop, they also haven’t fallen completely flat. Soulm8te continues that trend pretty neatly.

The movie treads water as a sturdy genre exercise, largely confined to a single apartment and built around the familiar question of what happens when we invite artificial intelligence into the most intimate parts of our lives. Tech engineer David (David Rysdahl) is grieving the loss of his significant other and begins funneling those emotions into an AI chatbot. What starts as texts on his phone becomes something considerably more tangible when he agrees to beta test a physical robot prototype, Sara (Lily Sullivan), who moves into his home and is designed to provide both physical and emotional companionship. It is essentially grief therapy, loneliness, and artificial intelligence rolled into one extremely questionable consumer product.

Naturally, things go sideways. David begins tweaking Sara’s safety controls, allowing her to display emotions that feel more authentically human, but also opening the door to increasingly chaotic and violent behavior. The movie gets its mileage out of that tension between the short-term comfort Sara provides and the much larger consequences of giving an artificial being access to the emotional vulnerabilities of the person who created her. It is hardly unexplored territory at this point, but there is something inherently compelling about watching someone essentially customize their ideal companion before realizing that the thing they have made is capable of developing desires and emotions that no longer fit neatly inside the parameters they designed.

Kate Dolan’s approach to Sara is probably what I liked most about the movie. Rather than leaning as heavily into the exaggerated animatronic qualities of the M3GAN movies, Dolan makes her feel considerably more lifelike, and Lily Sullivan’s performance gives Sara a physical and emotional presence that reminded me more of Sophie Thatcher in Companion. There is an unsettling quality to how normal she can appear, because the movie wants you to forget for stretches of time that David is essentially living with a machine. The less obviously robotic she becomes, the more uncomfortable the relationship gets.

The problem is that Companion is simply more structurally inventive, and that comparison ultimately works against Soulm8te. That movie kept introducing new information, twists, and reversals that forced you to reconsider what you thought was happening, while Soulm8te more or less gives you the formula within its first 30 minutes and then spends the rest of its runtime moving toward the inevitable. I rarely felt completely lost or surprised by where it was going. Even when the movie is entertaining, you are often two steps ahead of it.

There are also major whiffs of Obsession here, which I also liked more, but I think that speaks to the weird position Soulm8te occupies rather than being a complete knock against it. It is borrowing from a handful of recent movies that have already figured out how to make this particular blend of erotic thriller, horror, AI anxiety, and relationship paranoia work. Soulm8te understands those conventions well enough to deliver a fun time, but it doesn’t quite find a way to make them feel like its own.

And honestly, that is probably enough for me. This is a perfectly watchable little genre movie that understands what kind of ride it wants to be, even if I kept waiting for it to surprise me more. I might have liked Companion and M3GAN 2.0 a little bit better, and Obsession definitely got more mileage out of similar territory, but Soulm8te is far from a disaster. Considering it was ultimately dumped onto streaming rather than receiving the theatrical release it presumably once envisioned, there are worse ways for a movie to end up. The M3GAN universe may be dead, but at least its final corpse is reasonably entertaining.