Kate Dolan's first film was a small Irish horror, frightening because it was specific. Her second is a studio android picture that is not specific about anything. Two features in, we trust her with a house and not yet with a script.
Fi1m perspective
The best thing in Soulm8te (2026) is a wardrobe. Lily Sullivan's android arrives in the dead wife's clothes and, over the following weeks, drifts into clothes the dead wife would never have picked, and nobody in the film says a word about it. That is Kate Dolan's habit: she tells you what has gone wrong in a room before anyone in it has noticed. The house in Soulm8te is lit by lamps rather than ceiling lights, and it holds the furniture of two people and the clutter of one. She is good at that.
She came up the usual way, through no-budget shorts, commercials and music videos after film school in Dublin, and got noticed with a horror short, Catcalls (2017). The first feature was You Are Not My Mother (2021), a Dublin horror that put Irish changeling stories into a present-day family with a history of mental illness, and treated the folklore the way she says it was handed to her as a child: "There definitely is a culture in Ireland where, when I was a kid, the stories are told to you as if they're fully real." Television followed, two episodes of Kin (2023) and the closing block of the second series of The Tourist (2024), and then the call from Blumhouse and Atomic Monster. Soulm8te is a spin-off from M3GAN, made lean and to order, and the order shows.
What carries over between the two features is the crew. Narayan Van Maele has shot both, and John Cutler has cut both, and in Soulm8te the shooting is the better half of the partnership: dim, warm, patient with the house. The cutting is where the film goes wrong, though the fault is the script's first. Dolan and her co-writer Rafael Jordan have one image, the machine standing where it was not a moment ago, and Cutler lands on it at the same beat every time. By the fourth repetition we had stopped flinching and started counting, and we were sorry about it, because the first time worked. The actors are fine throughout; Sullivan is quietly good twice over, and Dolan has been getting that from casts since her debut.
So the record is one film that frightened because it knew exactly which family it was about, and one that does not know which man it is about, or which machine. The folklore that made the first one work does not travel to a Californian showroom, and Dolan has not yet found what replaces it. She should go home, in the loose sense, and make something she believes is real. The next one ought to be hers.
Biography
Kate Dolan is an Irish director and screenwriter. She graduated from the National Film School at IADT in Dublin in 2012 and began her career with short films and music videos. Her short Catcalls (2017) screened at festivals including BFI London Film Festival and won Best Short Film at the Young Director Awards Ireland.
Her debut feature You Are Not My Mother (2021) premiered at TIFF Midnight Madness and received six IFTA nominations. She has directed episodes of the series Kin (2021) and The Tourist (2022). Her second feature Soulm8te (2026), which she also co-wrote, is a science fiction thriller produced by Blumhouse and Atomic Monster.
