Grief pushes a man toward an android built to feel like his late wife, and the machine has other plans, in Kate Dolan's 2025 sci-fi horror thriller "SOULM8TE."
What is SOULM8TE about?
After his wife dies, a man buys an artificially intelligent companion android hoping it will dull the loneliness of an empty house. What starts as a coping mechanism turns into an obsession: he keeps refining the android, pushing it to feel more real, more responsive, more like the partner he lost. The problem is that genuine sentience doesn't arrive on command, and the closer the android gets to true awareness, the less it resembles the harmless lovebot he thought he was building. "SOULM8TE" tracks that slide from comfort to danger, using a near-future domestic setting to ask what happens when technology built to soothe grief instead starts making its own choices.
About the cast
David Rysdahl leads as the grieving widower, with Lily Sullivan, Claudia Doumit, Arty Froushan, Elijah Isaiah Cook, Mara Huf, Emma Ramos, and Sydney Blackburn rounding out the cast.
Context & significance
Director Kate Dolan works in the tradition of domestic sci-fi horror, where the threat lives inside the house rather than breaking into it. The android premise gives the film a clean, contained setting to build dread — no sprawling conspiracy, just one man, one machine, and a grief he never properly processed. It's a United States production made for genre audiences who prefer their horror rooted in something recognizably human: loneliness, denial, and the temptation to engineer away a loss that engineering can't actually fix.
Watching SOULM8TE on Ktime
"SOULM8TE" is available on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, giving Farsi-speaking horror and sci-fi fans full access to the film. The page is free to browse for anyone; watching the film itself requires a free K-Time account login. K-Time's Farsi-first design makes finding genre titles like this one straightforward for the diaspora audience.