The Artifice Girl - Sie ist nicht real

The first act is a great short conversational sci-fi film: engaging, striking, well-acted, well-written and with a great plot point. The other two acts are a decent extension of said short into a full feature film, and I don’t think it was really necessary. (04.05.2023)

What would happen if AI outgrew humanity and acquired emotions to boot? What would then distinguish it from humans? The Artifice Girl initially feels like a fresh debut in the AI genre, divided into 3 acts, and it totally grounded me in the first. The atmosphere was taut as a string, the dialogue in the interrogation room was brilliant and the gradual revelation of the creator's why, how and to what end he created the paedophile catching program was shockingly engaging. But I can't say the same for the rest of the film, I felt it went completely off that suffocating note and by the end it becomes a generic template about AI films that is not entertaining or shocking in any way, and the only thing it could theoretically score points with a certain group of viewers is philosophical debates about what is still AI and what is already human. And I wasn't impressed by the ending, I was expecting a gritty sci-fi concept that shows how dangerous AI is, shows a real threat and makes me fear for the next story development, but the film ends up being too down to earth, relying too much on girl-bot emotionality and as if they didn't want to go into a harder genre at all... Too bad, the potential was there. (03.05.2023)