The Artifice Girl

An artificial intelligence posing as a child in chat rooms is used to entrap online predators. The film tells the story of that program, called Cherry, across three separate time periods, almost entirely through conversations in closed rooms. The first act is an interrogation, the second a workshop, the third a reckoning that arrives decades later. Franklin Ritch wrote, directed and acts in it. Lance Henriksen plays the aged Gareth in the final act and carries the heaviest question in the film: if Cherry was built for this purpose, can she consent to it? The film does not answer, it demonstrates that no answer is available. It never hides its budget. No action, no locations, everything is dialogue. Some of the technical exposition in the second act runs long, and now and then the characters talk like people reading a paper aloud. Who it is for: quiet science fiction about the ethics of artificial intelligence. Who it is not for: viewers who want spectacle and pace.