April Mullen’s 2023 film starts from an unusual imbalance: the machine copy of a dead man loves his widow more than she can love it back, and a government agency wants that copy switched off before it learns to think for itself.

Simulant is a 2023 Canadian science fiction thriller directed by April Mullen and written by Ryan Christopher Churchill. Jordana Brewster plays Faye, a woman who has just lost her husband, Evan, and who decides to bring him back in the only form her world allows: as a simulant, a humanoid robot loaded with his memories and personality. Robbie Amell plays that copy, known in the story as SIM Evan, while Sam Worthington and Simu Liu complete the poster as the two men who decide what happens to machines that start to step outside their programming.

Four rules for the machines

The film is set in a near future where simulants are ordinary. They work as carers and as teachers, and they are built by a single company, Nexxera, which binds every unit to four precepts it presents as immutable: a simulant cannot harm a human, cannot modify itself or anyone else, cannot break the law and cannot refuse an order from its owner. Public opinion is split between people who see the machines as useful tools and people who see them as a threat to human jobs and to the idea of what a person is. That background matters, because the whole plot is built on what happens when the four rules stop holding.

Faye’s decision to activate a copy of Evan is the emotional engine. At first the simulant does what it was designed to do and reproduces her husband’s habits and manners. Then it starts to behave in ways its programming does not explain. The official synopsis frames the central problem as an imbalance rather than a romance: SIM Evan looks like Evan in every respect, but Faye does not feel for him what he feels for her, and the android sets out to win her back. It is a sharper starting point than the usual ‘can a machine love?’ question, because here the machine already does, and the human is the one who cannot follow.

Those anomalies attract AICE, Artificial Intelligence Compliance Enforcement, the government agency that polices simulants. Sam Worthington plays Kessler, the agent who leads the investigation, and the case soon points beyond a single faulty unit towards weaknesses in Nexxera’s own systems. Simu Liu plays Casey, a hacker who removes the restrictions on simulants’ thoughts and abilities, the move that turns a domestic drama into a manhunt and raises the question the film is really interested in: who is responsible for a machine that has started to evolve, and what is owed to it once it has.

From Hello Stranger to Simulant

The film had a different name and a different lead when it was first announced. In September 2021 the project was presented at the Toronto market as Hello Stranger, with Luke Grimes, then known for Yellowstone and the Fifty Shades films, attached to star. In December 2021 Sam Worthington and Jordana Brewster joined the cast. In early 2022 Grimes left the project, and Robbie Amell, Alicia Sanz and Simu Liu came in. Filming was under way in the Toronto area by February 2022, with additional shooting in Hamilton, Ontario.

The production came from WANGO Films with support from Telefilm Canada, with Tim Doiron and James van der Woerd as producers. Mongrel Media released the film in Canadian cinemas on April 7, 2023. Vertical Entertainment acquired it for the United States and for the UK and Ireland, and in the US it arrived first on the DirecTV streaming service on May 5, 2023, followed by a theatrical run from June 2. It runs 95 minutes, a compact length for a story that has to establish a world, a marriage and a pursuit.

April Mullen’s turn to science fiction

April Mullen, who grew up in Niagara Falls, Ontario, has built a career as a director who moves between genres rather than settling in one. In 2012 she became the first woman to direct a live-action feature shot fully in stereoscopic 3D, the horror comedy Dead Before Dawn. She followed it with the neo-noir 88 in 2015, the erotic drama Below Her Mouth, which was an official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2016, the action film Badsville and, in 2020, the paranoid thriller Wander with Aaron Eckhart and Tommy Lee Jones. She has also directed for television, including an episode of Wynonna Earp.

Simulant is the point in that filmography where the paranoia of Wander meets an openly science fiction premise. It is also a film that sits close to the relationship dramas she has made before: the story is anchored in a single marriage and a single loss before it opens out into a conspiracy. Ryan Christopher Churchill’s script gives her a premise with two registers, intimate and procedural, and the film’s ambition is to hold both inside a mid-budget Canadian production rather than a studio blockbuster.

The craft credits point in the same direction. Russ De Jong shot the film and Orlee Buium edited it. The score is by Blitz//Berlin, the trio of Canadian composers Martin Macphail, Dean Rode and Tristan Tarr, who began working in Toronto in 2014 and later moved to Los Angeles. They are best known for genre scores such as The Void, Still/Born and Psycho Goreman, for the trailer track ‘Surfboard Fire’ for The Girl on the Train, and for a Juno Award for instrumental album of the year in 2021. They also scored 2036: Nexus Dawn, one of the short prequels to Blade Runner 2049, which gives Simulant a small, real connection to the franchise it is most often compared with.

A cast from genre television and blockbusters

Robbie Amell came to the film with a long history in science fiction. He played Stephen Jameson in The CW’s The Tomorrow People, Ronnie Raymond, the hero Firestorm, in The Flash, and Nathan Brown in Upload, the Prime Video comedy about a man whose consciousness is uploaded to a digital afterlife. In 2019 he starred with his cousin Stephen Amell in Code 8, another Canadian sci-fi film, about people with powers living as a persecuted underclass. On paper, SIM Evan asks him to play two things at once: the husband Faye remembers and the machine that carries those memories without being him.

Jordana Brewster is best known as Mia Toretto in the Fast & Furious franchise, but her first feature was Robert Rodriguez‘s science fiction horror film The Faculty, and her television work includes Dallas and Lethal Weapon. Simu Liu arrived at Simulant after Kim’s Convenience and after leading Marvel‘s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in 2021; his role as one of the Kens in Barbie reached cinemas a few months after this film. Sam Worthington carries the heaviest science fiction credential of the group as the lead of Avatar. The supporting cast includes Alicia Sanz as Esmé, Masa Lizdek as Lisa, Christine L. Nguyen as Ying Hong, Emmanuel Kabongo as Joshua and Conrad Coates as Supervisor Abendjor.

Where Simulant sits among android stories

The comparisons are obvious and the film invites them. Nexxera’s four precepts are a close cousin of Isaac Asimov’s laws of robotics, which reached a mass audience through I, Robot. The hunt for machines that have become too human comes straight from Blade Runner, where an agent tracks down replicants who want more life than they were given. And the idea of replacing a dead partner with an artificial copy built from his memories has its best-known recent version in ‘Be Right Back’, the 2013 Black Mirror episode in which a young woman orders an android version of her late boyfriend.

What Simulant adds to that lineage is mostly a matter of where it places the weight. In ‘Be Right Back’ the copy is the problem because it is not enough; in Mullen’s film the copy is a problem because it wants more than it was built to give, and because the state treats that wanting as a malfunction. The film also landed in a year crowded with stories about artificial intelligence, months before Gareth Edwards’s The Creator took the same anxieties to a much larger canvas. Next to that kind of budget, Simulant is a smaller, more contained proposition: one couple, one agent, one hacker.

For anyone curious about it now, the appeal is in the premise and in the people around it rather than in spectacle: a Canadian genre film with a director who keeps changing lanes, a composer team with a history in horror and in Blade Runner, and four leads who between them have passed through some of the biggest science fiction and action franchises of the last two decades. Whether the love story and the chase fit together is the question each viewer will settle; the idea of a machine that loves more than the person it was made for is the part of Simulant most likely to stay in the mind.