SoulM8te

Soulm8te dropped on digital VOD August 1, 2026, a Blumhouse R-rated erotic sci-fi thriller spun out of the M3GAN universe and dumped straight to home video after M3GAN 2.0 cratered at the box office. Genuinely true: Blumhouse thought it had a whole franchise, greenlit sequels like this one, then got demoralized enough by that flop to cancel the theatrical release entirely.

Probably the right call. This opens on an interesting premise, like a drama about the loneliness crisis in the West, and very quickly collapses into another evil-companion-robot movie you can call the ending on before you punch in your credit card.

David is a grieving engineer at a robotics firm swallowed by a bigger tech company. Employees can beta-test AI companion products for analysis data. David bonds with a chatbot named Sara, then tests the physical SOULM8TE body (Lily Sullivan). Wanting a “genuine human experience,” he alters her code and rewrites her limits. Whatever you are already predicting for the rest of the plot is exactly what happens. Beat for beat. No surprises here.

Act one actually works. It sits quietly under a sad ambient score, watching a widower who has shut out the world open up to an AI chatbot as the only thing that seems to see him. It brings up Western loneliness and cites real male-loneliness statistics, and for a second you forget you are watching a direct-to-VOD Blumhouse horror flick and start hoping for a drama with something to say about a genuinely relatable problem. Then the robot replica shows up, and everything worthwhile goes out the window into predictable horror trite.

Not the actors’ fault. They do competent work with a D-tier Blumhouse script. If I had a nickel for every AI-horror-robot movie, I would have a lot of nickels. Set this against last year’s Companion: Sophie Thatcher played a robot with real human quality underneath. Sullivan looks fully human and plays a robot who has no idea how to be one, an interesting inversion that would land better in a different movie. Close-ups on her face keep finding this emptiness behind the eyes, nothing back there. Not sure that is a learnable acting skill, but credit where due: she plays a convincing robot.

That is the ceiling of what I can praise. The film opens on the male loneliness crisis and spirals fast and cruelly into something that hates men. The resolution: the robot gains self-agency, turns evil, and starts making claims that men are the reason women cannot achieve greatness. Among the casualties, it dismembers two men by their genitals in ugly, violent fashion, a kind of “take that, you filthy male perv” gesture. The irony: this is a female-presenting robot gaining more agency as the story goes, believing itself a woman, and turning more evil the more power it accumulates. So while the film wants to argue men hold women back, it accidentally argues that women in power turn tyrannical. Not the conversation worth having when loneliness is a real, widespread human problem, and there were far more interesting stories available than another contrived men-versus-women, all-men-are-pigs plot.

Want an AI-thriller robot movie? Watch Companion instead. This lands on my worst-of-the-year list, because on top of having nothing to say while acting like it does, it runs close to two hours. You hit the one-hour mark expecting the credits, check the clock, and find forty more minutes waiting.