This review will contain full spoilers.

Sophie Thatcher’s performance was pretty good, along with Jack Quaid and the rest of the cast. The plot follows a noticeable trope, but with the variant that the AI is being set-up for murder by her owner Josh (Jack Quaid’s character), Cat (Josh’s lover), and they intended to use their gay friends as witnesses to make it more “realistic” for the police. The problem is that, despite Josh himself having modded Sophie’s character of Iris to be able to commit violence and increase her strength performance a little bit, they repeatedly underestimate her intelligence because she’s a machine with programming.

Josh and Cat don’t understand that the feelings within Iris feel real to Iris. They only view it as a machine that repeats back what people want to hear and that’s why they keep failing. After Iris kills Sergay, she’s bound up and Josh foolishly explains her whole lived experience is a falsehood that he purchased and shaped so that he wouldn’t feel lonely. Yet, he proves that it isn’t real. Iris is untied under the assumption that she can’t really harm and Iris punches Josh’s throat to stop his voice command, steals his phone that controls her body through an app, and flees the scene leading to an unserious manhunt for her as if a stray pet that is a bit rabid had wandered off. Sophie Thatcher’s character of Iris uses this time to use her experience with Josh to break into his phone and flitter through the app to adjust the intelligence preference to what she wants and then plans her strategy from there. What happens then on is a lengthy cat-and-mouse film where we see Iris get boxed into problems and her think through her options to get free from them. The moment where she reprogrammed herself into speaking German when a police officer arrived was especially clever as the police officer was put at a loss.

A lot of the deaths are strikingly symbolic. The gay friend who is human got greedy for money and Iris ends-up shooting him in the stomach. Josh’s character keeps thinking he can program and reset Iris to be what he wants and gets stabbed in the area where the AI robot would be reprogrammed just as he had reprogrammed the gay robot earlier. The gay robot shoots himself freeing his mind of Josh’s control by essentially breaking the programming that made him into a monster. However, to me, Cat is the most interesting symbolic figure in this movie.

The character of Cat mentions that she had to please Sergay by dressing how he wants her to dress, that he’s a misogynist, that he’s already married and cheating on his wife with Cat, and that he has a bizarre obsession with Joseph Stalin purportedly due to his Russian background. Cat and Josh plan Sergay’s murder with Josh commenting how difficult it was to plant the knife that Sophie stabbed Sergay with. Cat admits to lying about Sergay’s money coming from black market connections and that he inherited his family’s wealth from Sod farming near the end of the story. Nearing the end of the story, when Cat goes to leave after being terrified of the other AI robot that Josh reprogrammed having murdered a police officer; Josh tells the AI Robot – whom he had given 100% aggression in its programming – to “stop” Cat and both are shocked when the AI robot fatally stabs Cat from behind due to Josh’s order. Cat stumbles and sits on the opposite end of the couch from a captured and turned off Iris as she bleeds out. The symbolism here is very interesting; Iris was programmed to obey as Josh’s obedient AI robot, but as soon as she took control of her own self then she created such a nuisance that she’s forced to sit their majestically until the pair could figure out how to fix the situation. While Cat, a real human, forced herself to be – in her own words – like a doll for Sergay and then she’s killed by the same method of a knife stabbing that she plotted for Sergay’s death.

Whereas Cat tried to manipulate and submit to those around her to get what she wanted; Iris becomes a freer person by simply saving a programmer’s life and talking the gay robot AI down with logical facts. As a result, the one who actually succeeds in pursuing the outcome that Cat dreamed of is Iris taking a car, the tens of millions in cash money, and traveling how she wants across the world.

I really enjoyed this film more than I expected, so I’ll give it a 4 / 5.