Soulmate

Whilst AI hasn’t literally overtaken filmmaking just yet, films about AI are nearly there. And it’s not just blockbusters like Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning and The Creator that warn about the rise of the machine. Shorts like Soulmate offer a smaller-scale imagining of what the future holds once our lives are intertwined with artificial intelligence to such a degree that the real and the simulated are indistinguishable.

Director Richard Fenwick’s film follows Anna (Mandeep Dhillon), a computer coder who, in lieu of suitable men for a relationship in the real world, has struck up one with Neil (Joe Dempsie) – an AI simulation who exists in a world imagined by her company. Neil is the ideal partner for Anna, but such relationships are forbidden – and when evidence of the affair is uncovered, Anna faces a race against time and her sinister supervisor (Andrew Cullum) to prevent Neil from being erased forever.

Cinema’s realisation of future technology through a humanisation process is hardly a new thing – the future of robotics in the 80s didn’t come in the form of a leather-bound Arnie for nothing. AI in Soulmate isn’t designed to be scientifically accurate – but to instead raise questions about morality, ethics and meaning in its future. Whether future AI will be able to fool the brain into thinking we’re actually making out with an indistinguishable recreation of Joe Dempsie is still very much in question (we can all dream, right?) but questions of humanity’s relationship to technology, and how this is likely to be policed is a much more relevant issue, and one this is explored here in an interesting way.

Anna’s life in the real world is shown to be monotonous and free of passion, having been worn down by the path society has taken. The film takes steps to show that her pursuit of a relationship with an AI, and the risks she is willing to go to in order to protect it are morally ambiguous. We root for her as the protagonist – but spending her life fixated on a screen, addicted to a life inside a simulation is also framed as a tragic endeavour by Fenwick. The fallibility of the machine is a heartbreaking beat that harkens to K’s revelation about the nature of his relationship in Blade Runner 2049, and a key point in Soulmate that underlines that the future is going to be one hell of a hard place to navigate.

Mandeep Dhillon’s performance as Anna is what allows much of this moral ambiguity to come through in the film. Anna is shown to be ultimately a good person beaten down by the world around her, yet her frantic pursuit of the relationship with Neil begins to dawn on the viewer as a tragic mistake thanks to the small details. The determination that exudes from her eyes and poise, and the haunted expression worn at the film’s conclusion hits hard – especially once viewers internalise the inherent falsehood of the relationship that she has made the centre of her existence.

The film isn’t perfect – tech nerds are likely to drive a truck through the science of the film, and whilst the embrace of darkness and shadows in the coding scenes is designed to create a sense of isolation and foreboding, it quite simply isn’t that interesting to watch. But the emotional exploration and ethical considerations that resonate throughout the film – without ever being beaten over the viewer’s head – make this one of the more interesting ‘AI’ films of recent times.