'Soulm8te' Review: A Mediocre Erotic-thriller That Expands the M3GAN Universe
- 23 hours ago
- 4 min read
By Dan Bremner - August 4, 2026
The third film in the M3GAN franchise and a spin-off from the main series, a release I genuinely did not expect to materialise given that M3GAN 2.0, which was an improvement on the fairly rubbish original, still failed to set the world on fire commercially in ways that made me sure this would get written off as a tax scam and left unreleased. Then Soulm8te appeared with essentially no warning and absolutely no promotional campaign, dumped on VOD.
You can very clearly see why this was originally scheduled as a January release before presumably even that modest ambition proved optimistic. There is some fun to be had here, the ridiculous sci-fi slasher mechanics deliver on their basic premise with occasional genuine commitment, but this is exhausted and generic territory navigated with the bare minimum of imagination, doing what it aims to do with a competency so minimal it barely qualifies as ambition.
The premise is the kind of thing that would have felt provocative and strange in 1995 and in 2026 sits firmly in a crowded genre lane that Companion, Ex Machina and various other entries have already explored with more intelligence and fun satire. Grieving man acquires android companion, android develops unsettling attachment, android becomes dangerous. The film understands it is telling a story audiences have encountered before and responds to this awareness not by finding a fresh angle or a new thing to say but by simply proceeding anyway. By the midpoint I had correctly guessed what the final shot of the film would be based purely on the title and the genre mechanics established in the first act, and I was right, which is not always the experience a thriller should produce in its audience.
The central male lead David is played by David Rysdahl, an actor who has the specific and deeply unfortunate quality of looking distractingly like Tom Green. I am aware this is not a serious critical observation and I don't care, because I spent the entirety of this film waiting for him to spontaneously begin singing “Daddy Would You Like Some Sausage" and the anticipation proved thoroughly distracting. Setting aside this entirely personal and probably unfair response, the character as written is a genuine dramatic liability, underwritten and underdeveloped to the point where you spend the film more interested in what the android is doing to him than in anything he's doing himself. He's a drip. He's the least interesting presence in any room he enters. The film's misfortune is that he's nominally the protagonist.
Lily Sullivan as Sara the android is the film's main saving grace and delivers a genuinely unsettling and frequently very funny performance that belongs in something considerably better. She navigates the technical demands of playing a machine becoming dangerously sentient, finding the register between robotic flatness and volatile menace that the role requires, and her scenes have an unpredictable quality that the rest of the film lacks. Sullivan is doing interesting and committed work here with such generic material. Someone cast this woman as a lead in something worthy of her abilities immediately.
The gore is the film's other genuine and consistent delivery on its modest promises, featuring some brutal kills and, in a creative decision I did not anticipate, not one but multiple distinct instances of cock and ball annihilation delivered through different mechanisms across the runtime. This is either a remarkable commitment to a comedic bit or the work of a writer with very specific preoccupations and I'm not entirely sure which. Either way it generates the film's most memorable moments and the only sequences likely to be discussed by anyone who watches it.
The erotic dimension of what is labelled an “erotic thriller” is unfortunately more tame than the premise demands, lacking the trashy, genuinely horny energy that would have given the whole enterprise the campy disreputable charge it needs. Had this been made in the mid-nineties it would have been more interesting and considerably less restrained about what it was. The '90s understood that if you're going to make a film about a man falling in love with a murderous android you should at least commit to the sleaze.
Soulm8te is a generic and predictable evil android slasher made of parts you've seen before with no fresh new angles. Lily Sullivan commits to the android role and there is some surprisingly great gore, but the main lead looks too much like Tom Green to take seriously, and it's nowhere near trashy or sleazy enough as it needs to be to be fun. Outside of one or two moments, just very forgettable.
'Soulm8te' released on digital platforms on August 1, 2026.
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