In a near-future New York, Abby (Maria Bakalova) works in a neuroscience lab tracking the brain waves of monkeys, struggling to deal with the recent death of her father, played by David Strathairn. An intrusive, Siri-like AI assistant encourages her to visit a shabby-looking tech start-up called Seeking a Friend Store; there, a lone employee played by Adam Palley offers to recreate someone you’ve lost or are missing. After uploading a parcel of photos, documents, and other archival material to its servers, the company creates a digital avatar that you can call on your phone whenever you like. After some initial reluctance, Abby creates a digital version of her dead dad, and soon begins talking to it as a means of managing her grief as she tries to go forward in her life.
These are strange scenes. For narcissists, incels, and sociopaths, the appeal of a chatbot is that it will always tells them exactly what they want to hear, so you can imagine how uncomfortable it is to listen to such a thing telling someone else what they want to hear. As the platitudes and clichés dribble out of Abby’s phone, not even an actor with Strathairn’s delivery can save them.
That vulnerability offers real possibilities. For emerging companies like You, Only Virtual, HereAfter AI, Super Brain, and Silicon Intelligence, grief represents an exciting new market. Researchers are already beginning to identify the obvious financial incentives for such companies to alter the “informational bodies” of the dead to increase engagement and revenue. Rather than moving people through the process of grieving, AI companies would seem to benefit more from keeping them in the phase of acute bereavement, distorting their memories to give them what they want, all the while promising the false allure of being perpetually free of loss. Indeed, one wonders if Abby’s dad was really this asinine in life, or if Seeking a Friend Store has already tweaked his personality to keep her paying subscription fees.
O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback.
At one point, the AI develops the ability to call Abby of its own initiative—you think this may signal a turn in the narrative, some malevolent warning about technology getting out of control, but it doesn’t. At another point, Abby begins dating a man named Douglas (Avi Nash), and the viewer thinks maybe he will turn out to be a jerk, but he doesn’t. The viewer thinks perhaps her AI dead father will get jealous, or otherwise turn haywire. He doesn’t. You may think Abby will have to learn to let go of her father to be with her boyfriend, but she doesn’t! The few conflicts that do arise have such low stakes that they are resolved within minutes and forgotten almost immediately. No character conflict has any kind of lasting ramification or seems to matter for any serious length of time. Anytime it seems like there might be any kind of friction, the plot backs off.
We’ve known this for thousands of years; it’s one of the most basic lessons of Aristotle’s Poetics. Catharsis—the purging of negative emotions that happens through the experience of watching something difficult; of dealing with a character’s actual pain and suffering; of being engaged with issues of actual tension, drama, hardship, impossible decisions, insurmountable odds, tragedy, and resolve in the face of despair—matters not just because it allows us a safe venue to release these emotions, but because it gives us perspective on our own troubles and hardships. Grappling with pain through art is one of those very existential things that makes us human, that allows us to experience the world fresh and anew. That word itself—catharsis—has remained so elusive since Aristotle’s days, so hard to pin down, precisely because it’s hard to say exactly what it is we need from great art. There is no simple definition, no easy formula, no predictable algorithm that can deliver it to us. It seems cheesy to have to say this, but we live at a moment when AI-generated art that fails to deliver this is being passed off as legitimate, and sometimes just stating the obvious becomes an act of resistance against this dreck.
In a strange way, the fantasy of painlessness is particularly fraught for Rotzler. Her previous films appeared under her maiden name, Sackler. Her grandfather, Raymond Sackler, was one of three brothers who founded Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company behind OxyContin; her father, Jonathan, sat on its board and was its vice president for years.
In the decades when Jonathan Sackler was involved with Purdue Pharma, it generated billions of dollars by distributing Oxycontin throughout the United States and abroad. In 2007, the company pleaded guilty to misleading the public about the addictive properties of OxyContin, and the year Jonathan died the company reached a settlement in which it admitted that for years it had “knowingly and intentionally conspired and agreed with others to aid and abet” doctors in dispensing the drug “without a legitimate medical purpose.” (The consulting firm McKinsey & Company additionally agreed in 2024 to a $650 million settlement for its work in helping “turbocharge” Purdue’s sales of OxyContin during the epidemic.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 1999 and 2018 alone, 450,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses.
Rotzler has insisted that the film is not autobiographical. “This film is about artificial intelligence and there are no parallels between my father or his work and the characters in the film,” she told Artnet through a representative. Fine. That’s her take. Still, the film’s theme of painlessness is one that resonates with the family business of selling pain relief; and the film’s obliviousness to the shallowness of the AI bot’s consolations echoes with Purdue’s years of denying the dangers of its opioids.
Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain.If there’s an animating impulse in O Horizon beneath its facile resolution of grief, it’s denial: the steadfast inability to contemplate how this story of a daughter conjuring a smoother, simpler version of her late father might play to audiences who have followed years of news of the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers’ central role in it.
Rotzler’s uncle Richard Sackler once wrote of those overdosing from his company’s drug, “These are criminals.… Why should they be entitled to our sympathies?” Why indeed. I think of Susan Crathern, whose son Kevin broke two teeth on the playground when he was 10 and was given OxyContin for the pain, his mother assured by the dentist that it was not addictive. Ten years later, he died from an accidental overdose after years of struggling from addiction. In her 2020 testimony to Congress on the damage wrought by the opioid crisis, Crathern wrote: “In my mind his death is a truth that can’t be true.”
This is how grief actually is for too many people, down in the wreckage, where it is a paradox that can’t easily be solved, one that can’t be glibly assuaged with pabulum and clichés, a thing not to be solved with subscription fees, engagement algorithms, and prefabricated compliments but faced with rage and guilt and sorrow and carried every day without reprieve. For too many people’s lived reality, grief is the unimaginable weight of memories, the ugly truth that can’t be true. There’s no money to be made from it, so it gets hidden away, pushed down out of sight, past the detritus, down here, below the horizon.
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