This afternoon, I watched an extraordinary science fiction movie entitled The Artifice Girl.
Directed and written by Franklin Ritch, who also plays its lead human character, and released in 2022 by XYZ Films, The Artifice Girl is all about an incredibly advanced and ultra-realistic yet nonetheless a wholly virtual CGI girl created and named Cherry by troubled computer genius & anonymous online vigilante Gareth (Franklin Ritch, and with Lance Henriksen playing him as an old man) to use as bait (hence this movie's title) for ensnaring vile child predators lurking on social media.
Moreover, once he successfully confirms during interrogation that he himself is not an abuser, by revealing to them the existence of Cherry and her astonishing capabilities, Garth is thereafter assisted in his heroic endeavours by two top-secret American government investigative agents, Deena (Sinda Nichols) and Amos (David Girard).
However, Cherry swiftly and unexpectedly evolves into a super-intelligent, sentient, independent AI entity with a mind and ambitions of her own, which complicates matters very profoundly. So too does Gareth's intensely personal and tragic secret motive that perpetually haunts him and drives him on unceasingly in his determined quest to expose as many paedophiles as possible for the authorities to arrest and imprison.
The film
is split into three separate segments, each successive one focusing upon a different,
ever more advanced stage in Cherry's development and evolution from sophisticated
computer program to self-aware AI being to eventual cyborg.
Although filmed entirely in just a handful of small, sparse sets, The Artifice Girl is absolutely engrossing and fascinating throughout its 93-minute running time. This is due in no small way to the extremely thought-provoking scientific and associated moral issues discussed at length in the gripping, brilliantly-scripted dialogue ricocheting back and forth between the four principal characters, in which not a single word is superfluous.
In addition, young actress Tatum Matthews is truly spellbinding as Cherry (she apparently learned how to talk robotically for this movie by studying the speech patterns of Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa). For even though she is seen merely as a disembodied on-screen talking face for almost the entire movie (only in the final section has Cherry ultimately acquired a physical cyborg body), she always totally dominates the viewer's attention – a major acting career awaits, surely. Incidentally, please rest assured, there is absolutely NO visual representation of any kind of abuse in this film, and only some plot-essential but wholly non-descriptive references within the characters' dialogue.
The Artifice Girl premiered on 23 July 2022, in Canada, at Montreal's 26th Annual Fantasia International Film Festival, where it won the coveted Gold Audience Award for Best International Feature, but it only received a very limited USA release, in just a few select cinemas, on 1 May 2023. Following this, it has only been available in Video On Demand format, which is a crying shame, as this riveting but little-known, hidden gem of a feature so deserves to be brought to the attention of a much wider audience – hence my reason for reviewing it here on my Shuker In MovieLand blog.
Happily, I was able to watch this film today on Daily Motion's website, and in just three days' time, on Tuesday 22 April 2025, it will be broadcast on British TV, at 9.00 pm on the terrestrial TV channel Film4 (indeed, it was seeing a mention of its upcoming Film4 screening in this weekend's TV guide for next week that brought the movie to my attention, as I'd never previously heard of it). So if you live in the UK, you can view it on there next Tuesday.
But wherever you're based, if you'd like to watch The Artifice Girl online, and free of charge too, please click here to do so on Daily Motion.
Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
