Debut: 'Soulmate'
Richard Fenwick’s film Soulmate (2023) was nominated for 45 awards and won 14. The awards won ranged from Best Director for Fenwick to Best Sci-fi Short Film. While the directing, special effects, and acting are undeniably appealing, the film is far from stellar, and the nine awards it won for best short film are puzzling.
Soulmate follows a computer coder named Anna (Mandeep Dhillon), who falls in love with an artificially created human, Neil (Joe Dempsie). The relationship is not allowed by the company she works for, and when her supervisors begin to look for the rule breaker, Anna struggles to save herself and her AI lover.
The plot feels like something out of the Netflix series Black Mirror. The genre of technology and humans entangled with dangerous repercussions is always interesting, however, and as the use of Artificial Intelligence becomes more complex and controversial, these stories continue to be interesting and timely. This short film, while interesting, has nothing new to say and fails to make a lasting impression.
For starters, there is very little world-building, which, in Fenwick’s defense, is difficult to establish in a 14-minute film. However, subtle clues as to the state of this futuristic world the viewer is introduced to would have been helpful — a news alert in the background of the employee lounge or maybe even some detail seen through Anna’s bedroom window. These things could have helped establish this futuristic world.
Anna works in a bleak concrete facility that watches over an artificially created world of color and life. Why do these two worlds look so different? Has something happened in Anna’s world that forced them to create an AI world? Why does the AI world look more like the world in the present? Why is a relationship with AI illegal and why is Anna lonely enough to risk getting captured? These are questions that are never answered and loom over the final film.
Dhillon does a good job as Anna, imbuing her character with palpable desperation, and in one scene, when she attempts to delete her coding history with Neil before her supervisor sees it and realizes that she broke the commingling rules, she brings genuine tension to the moment. However, the film’s lack of information ultimately cuts into these emotional moments.
The viewer is told very little about Anna as a character, and again, subtle scene decorations in her bedroom, where the film spends most of its time when not at the company, would have helped understand her motivations. She loves Neil, and their chemistry is appealing, but why did she enter an AI world? Was she looking for an escape? If so, why?
The design and look of the film are stunning. The effects as Anna enters the digital world are great to look at, but any praise of the film ultimately comes back to the questions posed, which ruin the overall viewing experience. The film's conclusion also poses an interesting idea that seems to backtrack with most sci-fi films' conclusions around AI.
Whether it is 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) or Her (2013), AI in sci-fi films tends to end on the note that such technology is no real replacement for humans and that, ultimately, it is a threat to the existence and free will of mankind. When Anna erases her coding history with Neil to avoid detection and (presumably) harm from her company, Neil loses his memories of their interactions in the digital world. When Anna reenters this AI world after avoiding detection, Neil has no recollection of her and rejects her advances.
This would have been a powerful ending, and Dhillon’s performance when she realizes what she has done is emotional and moving, but the film ends with them reconnecting in the library where they originally met. This almost seems to imply that humans and AI can co-exist, an interesting concept given the controversy in the film industry surrounding the use of AI.
The film argues in favor of AI and humans, differing from most sci-films revolving around the subject (as previously mentioned) but in doing so, it says very little. Had Fenwick given Anna more character background and established more about the world being shown, perhaps something more interesting and memorable could have been created.
