Name: Simulant
Genre: Science Fiction, Thriller
Released: 2023-03-29T00:00:00+00:00
Cast: Robbie Amell, Jordana Brewster, Simu Liu, Sam Worthington, Alicia Sanz

The rain-slicked streets of Toronto glow neon under the weight of April Mullen’s Simulant, a film that opens with an android’s desperate sprint from faceless pursuers, its synthetic skin catching the city lights like cheap plastic. It’s a promising start, but one that quickly reveals itself to be more style than substance.

Simulant follows Faye (Jordana Brewster), grieving her husband Evan’s death in a car accident, as she replaces him with an android simulant—an eerily perfect replica played by Robbie Amell. The film’s central tension lies in SIM Evan’s struggle to win back Faye’s love while evading government agent Kessler (Sam Worthington), who hunts down conscious simulants deemed threats to humanity. Mullen, a veteran of television and low-budget thrillers, leans heavily on the works of Philip K. Dick, but where those stories interrogated identity and reality with nuance, Simulant settles for familiar tropes.

The film’s strongest moments come from its cast. Brewster delivers a restrained performance as Faye, her grief palpable even when the script falters. Amell, too, brings an unsettling humanity to SIM Evan, his robotic affectations subtle enough to make his eventual emotional outbursts land with surprising force. Worthington, however, chews scenery like it’s going out of style, reducing Kessler to a cartoonish villain rather than the complex antagonist he could have been.

Visually, Simulant is polished, with crisp cinematography and sleek production design that evoke Blade Runner on a shoestring budget. The action sequences are well-choreographed, and Mullen’s direction keeps the pacing tight. Yet for all its technical competence, the film never rises above the sum of its parts. The existential questions it raises—about love, consciousness, and what it means to be human—are handled with a heavy hand, lacking the subtlety or originality that might have elevated them.

The script, co-written by Mullen and Michael Ross, is where Simulant stumbles most. It’s a patchwork of ideas borrowed from better films, from the corporate conspiracy of Surrogates to the existential dread of I, Robot. The dialogue often feels stiff, and the plot twists are telegraphed miles in advance. A subplot involving SIM Evan’s factory-made girlfriend Esmé (Alicia Sanz) adds little beyond unnecessary complication, while Simu Liu’s Casey, a tech-savvy ally, is sidelined for much of the film.

The film’s climax—a showdown between SIM Evan and Kessler in a neon-lit warehouse—is visually striking but narratively hollow. It’s a sequence that relies on spectacle rather than emotional resonance, leaving the audience with a sense of anticlimax rather than catharsis.

Simulant isn’t without merit. Its themes are timely, its performances largely solid, and its technical execution commendable. But it ultimately fails to replicate the magic of the films that inspired it.