CinemaSerf (October 22, 2023)

So "William" (the ever-wooden Jonathan Rhys Meyers) has recently lost his wife and is assigned an AI replacement "Meredith" (Elena Kampouris), who is just like the real thing - except he has to sign a collision damage waiver if they want to have sex! Anyway, all is going well in their rather sterile Utopian life until we discover that there really is a ghost in her machine. A group called "Scare" is working to free the automated population from the dominion of mankind and it seems that "Meredith" might just be a conduit for that plan. She has dreams, and plenty of them. As they become more disturbing and a man called "Keene" (Fletcher Donovan) starts to feature more and more prominently, we all begin to realise that no-one is quite what they seem and betrayal is just around the corner. AI appears to be the gift that the writers want to keep on giving, but this one is very much at the weaker end of their imaginations. It isn't helped by lots of slow-motion sex scenes between two actors for whom chemistry was clearly not a school subject, and the plot meanders all over the place searching for something palpable to cling onto. Who's who? I'm afraid I didn't care - and the worrying signals that a sequel may be in the offing don't encourage either. If you ever saw "Humans" in the UK, then this is a poor relation of that...