Five Science Fiction Movies to Stream Now

‘The Artifice Girl’

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Franklin Ritch’s feature starts off like a taut thriller: a couple of agents, Deena and Amos (Sinda Nichols and David Girard), are grilling Gareth (Ritch), who has created a digital little girl to bait and catch online predators. Cherry (Tatum Matthews) has the appearance of an 11-year-old and her software is so sophisticated that, as Gareth puts it, she is almost completely “on autopilot.” Her behavior is so humanlike that a troubled Amos wonders if Cherry has feelings, too.

We reconvene with these four characters a few years later. Cherry looks the same but has continued to evolve. She has been created for a noble purpose, but her seeming realness makes the whole endeavor feel icky to Amos, who points out that if Cherry has evolved into near-sentience, then she would need to be asked to consent to her mission. She disagrees: “You should disregard everything I feel,” Cherry says. “I’m not human — I’m a tool.”

Another fast-forward and the aging Gareth is now in a wheelchair (in a brilliant casting twist, he is now played by Lance Henriksen, who portrayed one of cinema’s most memorable androids in “Aliens”). We are in the last stretch and Ritch narrows his focus even further, so he ends up with a face-off between Cherry and her creator, as they discuss such weighty matters as agency, what’s considered real, the importance of the physical realm, whether humanity can result from coding — and if yes, should A.I. get rights?

“The Artifice Girl” is essentially a three-act play but Ritch has come up with something uncommon: a movie entirely about ideas.