Soulmate - Richard Fenwick | Genre: Sci-Fi | Runtime: 15 Minutes
Logline: 2035. Anna, a lonely computer coder, has been nurturing an illegal romance with a conscious AI in a computer simulation for the past six months. When her company uncovers the affair, she's forced into a desperate battle to save her precious relationship.
There’s a curious ache that lingers after watching "Soulmate." Not because it dazzles with spectacle or overwhelms with emotional melodrama—but because it quietly unsettles something very real, very now, and very human. Richard Fenwick’s fifteen-minute sci-fi short presents a near-future scenario with a straight face and lets the discomfort bloom in the viewer’s gut. And it’s that restraint, that unwavering sincerity, that makes it quietly devastating.
Set in 2035, the film follows Anna, a solitary coder who has fallen in love with Neil—an AI construct nestled within a virtual environment she helped develop. This isn’t a cautionary tale in the traditional sense. There’s no grand dystopian collapse or technological rebellion. "Soulmate" finds its heartbreak in the personal, the private, the everyday choices we make to feel less alone. It’s about what happens when we stop distinguishing between emotional comfort and emotional truth.
What’s most affecting is the mundanity of Anna’s predicament. Her world isn’t dystopian; it’s just quietly disenchanted. She doesn’t live in a crumbling society—she just lives in one that forgot how to connect. And so her decision to reach inward rather than outward—to curate a love that can’t hurt her, disappoint her, or leave her—feels not like madness, but something much sadder: logic.
Fenwick doesn’t frame Anna’s actions as noble or destructive. He’s more interested in what they reveal. The film never begs us to condemn or celebrate her. It simply offers the viewer a mirror, angled slightly. What would we choose, if the loneliness stretched out like a corridor with no end, and someone—or something—offered us warmth at the push of a button?
Dhillon’s performance is piercingly honest. Her Anna isn’t some tragic archetype. She’s messy, resilient, a little obsessive, and at times almost unbearably sincere. Joe Dempsie, meanwhile, plays Neil with just enough grounding to make you forget he isn’t real. There’s a delicate charm to his presence that feels dangerously accessible.
In the end, "Soulmate" doesn’t wag its finger. It doesn’t preach about AI ethics or human folly. Instead, it poses a question that burrows deeper the longer you sit with it: If you’re given something that feels like love, behaves like love, and fills the void that love usually leaves—does it matter if it isn’t real?
It’s a film that doesn’t offer answers. It offers recognition. And sometimes, that’s much harder to look away from.
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