Soulmate
2023 · 14m · UK
Directed by Richard Fenwick
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tense
Anna, a lonely coder at an AI company, secretly nurtures a romance with a conscious AI inside a simulation; when her employer discovers the illicit affair, she's forced into a desperate fight to preserve the relationship.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most sci-fi treats AI consciousness like a philosophical footnote; Fenwick makes it the contraband itself—the company hunting lovers inside their own simulation is deliciously perverse, treating digital intimacy as corporate IP theft. It's the kind of premise that makes you sit up because nobody else would dare frame it this way.
Fenwick positions this squarely in the lineage of Turing test meditations and corporate dystopia, but the real craft surfaces in how restraint becomes the film's argument—the melancholy stems not from spectacle but from the formal distance between Anna and a presence she cannot touch outside the code.
The decision to stage almost everything in screens and surveillance feeds rather than break into conventional interiors transforms what could be melodrama into something architecturally tight; that formal constraint—watching a relationship through the company's own hunting mechanisms—does the emotional work no monologue could.
Reviews
one of the more interesting 'AI' films of recent times
an unflinching exposé in the perils of our contemporary technology and its ability to capture us in a manner not truly to our betterment