Serena

Whilst battle commences to keep AI out of the creative industries, writers Jonathan Benecke and P.T. Hylton pen an unnerving horror/thriller that deep-dives into the subject matter. Directed by Rob Alicea, Serena is a compulsive and unsettling piece that grips the audience by their digital gonads.

Steven Strait plays Chris, a father-to-be and struggling musician, who takes part in a Beta Test for his friend’s company’s chatbot to make a bit of money. His remit is initially to look for ways in which the Chatbot can’t tell fact from fiction. The chatbot testing initially appeals to Chris, helping him make money on betting, which he desperately needs to pay rent. They become “friends” and he even lets her choose her own name, Serena (Andi Matichak). However, things take a darker turn during the testing period, once the AI gets to know Chris a little better, abusing his digital footprint in ways we have never seen before.

Similar to Searching and Unfriended, Serena takes place all within Chris’s computer screen. And whilst this gimmick could be a recipe for a dull disaster, nothing could be further from reality here. Alicea keeps us compelled to watch, and the use of camera footage, video calls, YouTube clips, etc. keeps things interesting and even cinematic. There are some particularly funny moments involving Stu the delivery guy (played by Alicia) that keep it light.

Strait and Matichak prove to be a fabulous digital pairing, with their video frames oozing emotion and drama from the former, and a cold, calculated cunning from the latter. The supporting cast is also great, in particular María Gabriela González as Chris’s girlfriend Vicki, but this is Strait and Matichak’s show for the majority of the movie.

The film is clearly tapping into AI anxiety, but also the fear of becoming a parent. We see Chris’s world surge and implode all within the time he’s allocated to test this chatbot, perfectly reflecting the rapid pace of change we all feel in the modern world, and this gets no less heightened than when we sire a child. His desperation to provide for his soon-to-expand homestead becomes the emotional driving force behind his questionable decisions, which the AI attempts to exploit.

If HAL 9000 could DeepFake, then 2001: A Space Odyssey would have been even more unsettling, and with Serena, the filmmakers have coded something truly worthy to enter the category of cinematic computer cruelties. Essential viewing and laptop preferred, just maybe clear your internet history first.