Serena (2026)

On paper, Serena sounds like the kind of movie that could get boring really fast. You're watching a guy sitting at his computer talking to an AI program, along with calls and messages from other people. That's basically the movie. It's a big gamble. If those conversations get boring, the whole movie gets boring.

The thing is, I never got bored. The first half hour is a little slower, but I expected that. You have to learn who Chris is and why he's desperate enough to take this job. Once the story starts moving, though, it grabbed me. By the time it was over, it had gone somewhere I honestly hadn't expected. I like when a movie can surprise me without feeling like it's trying too hard.

What I especially liked is how the movie uses AI. There are a lot of stories right now about technology going rogue, and sometimes that means the smart house turns evil or the machines start trying to kill everybody. Serena isn't that straightforward. It's more about what happens when people don't know whether the things they're being told and shown are real. The scary part is that I can see people falling for some of it in real life.

Andi Matichak had a tricky job here. She's playing a computer that's trying to sound and act like a person, but isn't quite getting it right all the time. I thought she handled that really well. Steven Strait's performance took me a little longer to warm up to. He plays Chris so subdued early on that I wondered if he was going to sound that way through the entire movie. Once things start happening, that changes, and his performance worked much better for me.

This isn't a movie with monsters popping out or big scares every few minutes. It's a thriller built around a smart idea, good performances, and a story that kept surprising me. For something that largely looks like a video call, that's pretty impressive.

When Serena started, I had one thought: is this really going to be the whole movie? We're going to sit here and watch two people talk on a computer? I figured I was going to get fidgety, but I have to give this one credit.. it had me.

It took a little while to get everything going. I'd say the first thirty minutes are slower because they're explaining the situation and who these people are but I wasn't bored. Once things started happening, I really wanted to know where it was going. I got pretty proud of myself because I thought I'd figured it out. Nope. I was wrong, and I loved that it fooled me.

I thought the woman playing Serena was really good. Andi Matichak has to act like an AI that's almost human, and she made it believable. It was just a little off, which I think was exactly the point. Steven Strait, on the other hand, was so flat at first that I actually wondered if his character might be an AI too. I know he's supposed to be having a rough time, but I wanted a little more out of him in those early scenes. Fortunately, that changed as the movie went along.

The part that got me was how much of this depended on whether you trusted what you were seeing. Some of it was creepy because it didn't seem completely impossible. And there are things you would never convince me of. I'm with my husband practically 24/7. If he gets up, I'm already asking where he's going. Serena would have a pretty hard time fooling me about that.

I also had to remind myself that this is more of a thriller than a traditional scary movie. I kept waiting for the big horror moment, and that's not really what Serena is trying to do. Once I stopped expecting that, I could just enjoy the mystery. It surprised me, it kept me interested, and I enjoyed watching it a lot more than I expected.