In 2023, M3GAN put a campy spin on the horror of artificial intelligence, depicting an AI-powered toy turning on its creators and going on a meme-inspiring murder spree. This year brings SOULM8TE, a movie within the M3GAN universe, from director Kate Dolan (You Are Not My Mother). In SOULM8TE, David, played by David Rysdahl (Alien: Earth), is an engineer who’s recently lost his wife and procures an adult-sized artificial intelligent android to help cope with the loss. The android, Sara, is played by Lily Sullivan (Evil Dead Rise) and, much like M3GAN, this bot has some quirks. While there is some comedy and camp in SOULM8TE, it’s more of an erotic thriller that makes the audience question if all this AI stuff really is good for us — physically and mentally.
FANGORIA had a chance to chat with the two lead actors about their new movie, how they feel about the encroaching ethical problems of AI, and the practical effects in the film.
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FANGORIA: What are your thoughts on AI and tech, and how did that influence how you approached this film?
David: I think AI is here to stay and my biggest question is, what’s it doing to our brains and connections? And I’m really worried about that. I think it’s an incredible technology, but I just worry that we’re getting lonelier and lonelier and we’re going to outsource our humanity to this thing that we don’t understand. And culturally we have to catch up to the tech and understand ethics and boundaries and decide what kind of world we want to live in. And that has to be a conversation that we all have and not just a few billionaires in a few cities. This movie’s fun and a good time, but hopefully we need to be talking about this stuff.
Lily: This film is about intimacy, it’s about shortcuts, it’s about things scratching that itch, and consumption and changing your brain and instant gratification and basing a system off avoidance in a way. So for me, it was really fun to play this scenario out in a way that the freak show and the circus is already here, and now let’s just have the talk about intimacy and people’s relationship with technology in a really fun, weird, twisted way.
Did you know this was going to be part of the M3GAN universe going into it?
David: Yeah, we knew we were kind of a spinoff, obviously a rated-R version. But with that attitude that M3GAN has and the little bit of camp and ability to have a one-liner joke, all that stuff, those rules were kind of set. But then because we’re a spinoff, we could do our own version of an erotic thriller based more from the ’80s and ’90s.
Lily: Using the lineage of the ’90s erotic thriller and old Hollywood tropes and designing a robot through that lens for me was so interesting. There’s a campiness crossed with psychology around people’s sensitive relationship to technology. You’re so intimate with your dirty search engine, or you’re so intimate and unfiltered with AI. It was fun to lace the M3GAN world through it with one line here and there, to give that sensibility. But let’s play this version as R-rated. Kate Dolan’s got such a wicked sense of humor and an Irish sensibility. The satirical fun and the jokes that she’s having in this movie, it was hard to say no to that woman.
Were there any movies or roles that you looked at for reference?
Lily: For me it was Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, references from The Last Seduction, there is a bit of campy silliness that we all kept referencing, like Death Becomes Her, where no rules apply and the more serious you take the situation, the better it is. I feel like Sara is a manufactured woman placed inside a system of avoidance. You know what I mean? So I’m thinking, ‘Oh, what are these fantastical women that are on screen that seem empowered, but are still false versions of women in a way.’ So it was fun to put that, in a sense, through the programming of a robot.
David: You’re also playing off of a series of movies about AI. So you’re playing off of Her and Ex Machina. Companion hadn’t come out yet. These AI movies, this is all part of our lives now. So there’s going to be a million movies made about AI and our relationship to it. And ours was the intimate relationship version of that.
Lily: There are already people out there who have dolls that project a whole life for them, they don’t even talk. What’s going to happen when you can put that AI chatbot in a body? It was so fun to kind of feel the psychology of it and then just make the serving tongue-in-cheek and funny, because the freak show is here.
Talk to me about the practical effects in the film.
Lily: For a film about AI, it was pretty handcrafted, which was really, really fun. I mean, going through the journey of becoming Sara took stupid amounts of time. Even the final sequence, it took about five and a half hours to put it all together and green screen on the face where they could CGI that sort of stuff. But otherwise, it was all, texturally, already there. Half my hair burnt off, looked ridiculous. And then even the practical effects, even just the prosthetics on the back of the neck, that was beautifully handcrafted and designed.
What were some of the biggest challenges during filming?
Lily: I feel like the challenge for me and David the whole time was the suspension of disbelief. You’re creating intimacy, but also dancing with how much he knows that she’s jarring. It was a challenge for us to create that weird dance he does, where there’s a distance from her, but it’s also hypnotic. So that balance was tricky to find, but also one of the best experiences because it’s amazing what your imagination can allow.
And also trying to keep a straight face when the box with Sara in it is first opened. That was probably the hardest day on set. It was like day two. The first day was the karaoke scene. I said, ‘What do you mean I have to dance as a robot on the first day? I haven’t even walked. I haven’t even taken my first step as a robot.’ And Kate says, ‘I’m so sorry, but the next scene is when we open the box.’ And I’m, like, full frontal — well, not full frontal — and it’s boiling hot. They wanted the old school film lights. Felt like a 1970s porn set.
There is one kill that everyone is going to be talking about. Without spoiling too much, is there anything you could mention about that scene? I was not prepared for it.
Lily: Yeah. There was an energy in the air that day. I’m just like a feline robot, cat-crawling to the room. There was an energy of, ‘We’re doing this, we’re committing, we’re doubling down, we’re doubling down.’ We all knew it was in the script and weirdly, we’re shooting it pretty close to the end. We’ve got one take and one take only, and ’See you on the other side, everyone!’ It was very much that.
And then watching it in the film, I’m not going to lie, I love it. I love it. It’s fantastic for me.
I think a lot of people are going to love it.
Lily: Yeah. And really, really not love it.
What conversations do you hope people have after watching Soulm8te?
David: It’s that question of ‘what’s this doing to you?’ I have a couple friends that, we all have friends, who are using AI as a frictionless, sycophantic hype bot who’s saying you’re a genius. And I think about my relationship to social media and to the internet in general and we’re coming to a place where there’s a lot of questions to be asked. Everyone feels it, things don’t feel right. But we don’t want to have a film that preaches, ‘Oh, this is how you should do it.’ This is a fun film that shows how absurd this all is. And we’re all living in this absurdity and we’re also all addicted to it.
Most people are addicted to the internet in some form or the other. And it knows you in ways that your partner maybe doesn’t or your friends don’t. So it’s this dark mirror of yourself that the algorithm knows. And people are going to judge my character and say, ‘I wouldn’t do that.’ But you kind of do, in a way. You have your own version of it in your life where the algorithm knows you in a way that you don’t want to share with the rest of the world. That’s the interesting conversation to have for me.
Has the film changed how you look at AI going forward?
Lily: For me, my feelings towards it now are, ‘This is not going away; this is a relationship that we have to control, put boundaries up.’ More than ever, I have an awareness of the perils of that relationship.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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You can watch SOULM8TE on VOD now.
