Black Eyed Susan (2024)
Directed & Written by Scooter McCrae
Starring Damian Maffei, Kate Kiddo, Yvonne Emilie Thalker, Scott Fowler, & Marc Romeo.

Horror / Sci-Fi

★★1/2 (out of ★★★★★)

DISCLAIMER:
The following essay contains SPOILERS!
The future is now. Turn back or be spoiled forever.

The future of technology and artificial intelligence is already terrifying enough, though only more so through Scooter McCrae’s lens in Black Eyed Susan, as the viewer takes an unsettling ride through morality when financially-strapped Derek (Damian Maffei) takes up the job his recently deceased friend used to do, working for a friend named Gill (Marc Romeo) who’s heavily invested in creating new technology for the sex doll market. Derek doesn’t exactly know what he’s getting into initially. He quickly discovers Gill’s been working on an A.I. sex doll called Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thalker) who’s built to endure, and even enjoy, increasing levels of violence. Gill claims this is to cure society of certain ills, such as domestic abuse and more. Yet the more Derek gets to know Susan on a personal level, the more he discovers about the whole project, and the more terrifying it all becomes.

While right now we’re rightfully worrying about A.I. stealing our creativity and mining our artistic achievements so a bunch of lazy, uncreative neanderthals can prompt a computer to pretend like they’ve accomplished something at the click of a button minus all the labour, the burgeoning future of A.I. and general new tech in the sex industry is something far scarier, which is exactly what McCrae explores in Black Eyed Susan. On one hand, the film brings up important, difficult moral questions about how we can potentially use A.I. and other advanced tech to improve society. On the other hand, the film likewise questions the morality of how those improvements come about in the first place. There are no easy answers in McCrae’s film; that’s not the point. Black Eyed Susan is more about bringing up the ideas and looking long into the sometimes troubling heart of morality as it relates to how we intend on using A.I. technologies. Ultimately, the film questions how far our morality extends when it comes to the concept of A.I., as well as whether we have to bend our own morals in order to create a safer world or if bending them simply means we never had any morals in the beginning.
Gill’s entire reasoning for creating Susan to endure and enjoy abuse is because there are people who want to abuse others, and not in a consensual BDSM-type way, so “those feelings need to be expressed before [a person does] something dangerous to themselves or the people around them.” The depravity of men is evident throughout Black Eyed Susan and a quick moment brings to light how many men connect sex with violence through language. When Gill’s going through more procedural stuff with Derek, he questions if Derek’s feeling attracted to Susan enough to have sex with her. Derek replies by using a figure of speech that joins sex and violence in a deeply male way: “I have found it attractive enough to take a swing at, so to speak.” He’s ready to ‘take a swing’ by having sex with Susan, whom he refers to as ‘it’ here, and he’s also ready to punch Susan in the face; the disturbing psychological garbage bin of the male mind. While Derek’s being questioned before taking the new job, he says: “Turns me on to see a chick cry. I can‘t be the only one that feels that way.” Then Gill replies: “We‘re getting a lot of people that are starting to request that feature.” McCrae constantly fleshes out the bigger world of sexual violence happening in real life beyond the small walls of the film by dipping into the male psyche in various ways. Gill himself hits the nail on the head in regards to a male desire to hurt others without repercussions: “There‘s something wonderfully transgressive about hitting somebody with impunity, isn‘t there?” This gleeful comment by Gill belies a far different motivation behind his A.I. sex doll experiments than the righteous claims he makes about wanting to improve society. Even at the end of the film, Derek really learns nothing, as he claims he’s going to “burn the witch“; not exactly shedding his issues with women.

What’s the difference between a real child and a child doll built to be entirely lifelike, equipped with the technology in Susan that allows her bruise or her cut to look “like a real wound“? We already recognise the creepiness of men who continually lust after women who look like teenagers, so how do we dispense with morality just because one of Gill’s child sex dolls isn’t technically alive yet still looks, acts, feels exactly like a human child? Subjective morality is one of Black Eyed Susan’s most important themes. In one scene, as Derek gets on his high horse about Gill’s A.I. experiments, Gill questions him about “at what age does someone’s daughter suddenly become hittable.” Derek had no issue with beating and generally abusing a grown woman doll, but suddenly draws the line at the children. One type of abuse is not more moral than the other, nor is one type of abuse worse than the other; abuse is abuse is abuse.
The dark hole of morality opens up to swallow the viewer when Black Eyed Susan makes the point that if we create realistic female sex dolls that objectify women and their bodies, why is it any more immoral to do so with dolls of children? If they’re not real, it’s no big deal, right? The thought alone sickens me, personally. But, how is it any different? At the same time, the film points out how male violence is so out of control that people like Gill are trying to use technology to create a perfectly obedient victim, and questions how far men are willing to go in order to justify and excuse the violence they want to unleash on others. McCrae doesn’t pretend to try giving us any answers about the moral questions the film raises. There are only difficult, scary questions to confront, and when the film’s over the viewer’s left only with the company of a dark screen and the darkness of their minds with which to contend.