Raindance Film Festival review – Serena (2026)
Not to be confused with the 1962 Honor Blackman film or the 2014 Jennifer Lawrence film. This Serena (Andi Matichak) is the plausible ‘sexy but approachable’ face of a chatbot. Struggling musician Chris Sadowski (Steven Strait) – who briefly had success with his band Ghost Agent but is now down to recording kids’ birthday songs for $100 a pop – is persuaded by his corporate pal Will (Tyrone Marshall Brown) to replace a dropout in a ten-person beta-testing group, earning enough to stave off eviction in a single 75-minute session in which the algorithm has to learn the difference between fact and fiction.
The AI is surprisingly easily distracted from trivia questions about Star Wars as it settles into Chris’s computer and accesses every device in his home … at first helping him out with sports bets (pay attention to the score of the Leeds-Liverpool match) and reconfiguring his website to bring in more customers … then seemingly glitching with a prediction that he’ll be dead before the session is finished … then telling him things he really doesn’t want to know, flinging back at him the test he was supposed to be giving her/it, requiring him to distinguish true from false and even to demonstrate to her that he’s real.
Scripted by Jonathan Benecke and P.T. Hylton, who play two of the other testers, and directed by Rob Alicea, Serena is the kind of thing which tends annoyingly to get listed as a Black Mirror type of thing as if near-future tech-social satire were only invented in 2011 – it has plenty of other precedents in A.D.A.M., S1m0ne and Unfriended and holds up well against them, using the desktop format deftly without too much contrivance and working up a lot of suspense even as we’re basically watching pop-ups and incoming emails or video calls. Strait, from The Expanse, and Matichak, from the recent Halloweens, carry the film – he has to run an emotional gamut while sitting down and typing while she has to impersonate an algorithm which projects an illusion of smugness …
Like most desktop films, it demands attention – and rewards close viewing with those tiny tics where even the increasingly desperate Chris picks up on the algorithm’s tells. Maria Gabriela Gonzalez, Ashleigh Murray and Nicole Gut are good as Chris’ idealised pregnant girlfriend, the chirrupy human running the test and the AI advocate CEO of Nucleeus Tech. Know how far we are from the AIpocalypse? I just input ‘Serena film 2026’ on a search engine and had to wade through pictures of Jennifer Lawrence and Serena Williams – plus a mermaid film called Sirena – to find this one.
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