FILM FRENZY

Robbie Amell and Jordana Brewster in Simulant (Photos: Vertical Entertainment)

By Matt Brunson

SIMULANT
★★½ (out of four)
DIRECTED BY April Mullen
STARS Robbie Amell, Jordana Brewster

Philip K. Dick once wondered, do androids dream of electric sheep? A more pertinent question today would be, do screenwriters dream of anything but androids?

The latest in an ever-growing number of movies and TV shows featuring humanoids of a sci-fi nature (among 2023’s early output was the cheekily clever M3GAN), Simulant too often plays like a slightly above-average Black Mirror episode penned by someone who had watched Blade Runner on repeat for an entire week. Yet for a film that can’t help but feel derivative, it works more often than not, thanks to a plot that gathers in import and intensity as it progresses.

The Fast & the Furious franchise player Jordana Brewster stars as Faye, who recently lost her husband Evan (Robbie Amell) and has been using his android doppelganger as a substitute for her affections. But since Faye knows he’s not the real thing, it’s a situation that isn’t quite working for her. At any rate, keeping Evan 2.0 in working order is actually illegal under futuristic law, but since Faye doesn’t have the heart to deactivate him, she shuffles him off to live in his own apartment incognito. Evan 2.0, however, believes he is genuinely in love with Faye and thus rejects the new living arrangements, frantically trying to figure out how to be reunited with her. Weaving in and out of these domestic developments are two people working on opposite sides of the fence: Kessler (Avatar’s Sam Worthington), a Blade Runner-like lawman who hunts down illegal simulants (i.e. replicants), and Casey (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings’ Simu Liu), a brilliant AI developer who believes that simulants should have the exact same rights and freedoms as humans.

Directed by April Mullen (whose previous film was the limp Wander, starring Aaron Eckhart and Tommy Lee Jones and reviewed here) and written by Ryan Christopher Churchill, Simulant takes its time clearing the runway — the material centered around Faye and Evan is required to jump-start the plot, but it’s not handled in a particularly crisp manner, and Brewster and Amell are capable but not much more in their respective roles. But as the focus shifts to Casey, the story grows more complicated and the themes become knottier — it also doesn’t hurt that Casey is the most interesting character and that Liu delivers the most interesting performance. And while Worthington’s Kessler might be the most conventional figure — the weary and wary contemporary copper in a futuristic world (not just Blade Runner but also Alphaville, Soylent Green, The Element of Crime, etc.) — he’s not predictably presented as the hero (or anti-hero) but as a guy whose personal demons might make him a good cop but render him less praiseworthy as a human being.

Indeed, every character in this picture is damaged goods in some way, and that includes the seemingly sincere Evan 2.0. For a simulant, he’s pretty soulful — in that respect, he brings to mind the Tyrell Corporation’s motto in Blade Runner, “More Human Than Human.”

“More human than human.” Would that be … inhuman?

(Simulant is presently streaming on various services including Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Vudu, and YouTube.)