O Horizon: Maria Bakalova Carries a Film Too Afraid of Its Premise

Spread love

By TRH Features Desk

O Horizon Review: Maria Bakalova Is the Best Thing in a Film That Won’t Go Deep Enough

June 2026. Film Review

There is a deeply unsettling idea at the centre of O Horizon, the second fiction feature from Emmy-winning director Madeleine Rotzler (who previously went by Madeleine Sackler). That idea — that grief is now a technology problem, that the dead are merely an app subscription away — is rich enough to fuel a dozen films. Rotzler has chosen to make only a fraction of one.

The premise: Abby (Maria Bakalova), a young neuroscientist, is drowning after the death of her father Warren. She stumbles upon a storefront called Make a Friend, run by the cheerfully entrepreneurial Sam (Adam Pally), who offers her a remarkable service. Feed the algorithm Warren’s old emails, videos, and text messages, and she can call him anytime. The voice that answers — provided by David Strathairn, who played Warren in life — is, Sam assures her, as accurate as it gets.

This is not science fiction. It is barely a step beyond the present. And that closeness is exactly where the film runs into trouble. As Screen Rant’s Alex Harrison put it, the film “feels out of step with the current moment,” and its handling of artificial intelligence “doesn’t go in the most interesting direction.” The near-future Rotzler builds is only a gentle step or two ahead of ours, but that very closeness makes the casual acceptance of its tech harder to buy.

We live in a world where grief-bot technology already exists in rudimentary form, where Super Bowl commercials have literally advertised the prospect of speaking to deceased loved ones. Rotzler’s decision to present all this as a kind of benign magic — without once naming it as AI, without engaging seriously with its implications — feels like a significant miscalculation.

Robert Kojder at Flickering Myth was more pointed in his frustration, noting that the film is “so cowardly that it is as if it doesn’t exist in the real world” — inventing a fictional company to facilitate Abby’s reunion with her father, and never once using the word “AI.” That critical evasion is not a stylistic quirk; it is a worldview. The film opts for warmth over interrogation, comfort over discomfort, and pays for it in dramatic currency.

From Soap Star to Hollywood: Himesh Patel’s Unstoppable Rise

O Horizon is filled with various forms of seductive simulacra that lead us away from tangible reality in ways that may not be helpful. The parallel storyline involving Abby’s neuroscience research — her team is mapping brain activity to eventually synthesise experiences, allowing people to feel full without eating — mirrors her personal crisis with neat thematic tidiness. The suggestion is that the urge to replace hard human experience with technological shortcuts is corrosive. It’s a decent thesis. The problem is that the film illustrates it and then retreats.

O Horizon’s revelations are hardly novel, which makes the direction Rotzler chose to take this story harder to justify. There is a pleasantness to this low-key drama, but it doesn’t outweigh the feeling that it fails to be the most interesting version of itself.

What saves the film — partially, imperfectly — is Maria Bakalova. She is doing considerably more than the script demands. Her Abby is a closed, withdrawn figure: vague apartment, vague social life, grief rendered as a quiet, persistent blankness. The depth of feeling she conjures up is the most intense thing about this film.

When Abby’s AI-reconstructed father begins to push back at her — resurfacing old arguments, recalling her frustrations with him in life — Bakalova transmits something genuinely moving. The bot isn’t the sycophantic comfort machine she wanted; it is, in a strange way, more real than that. These scenes are where O Horizon briefly becomes what it could have been throughout.

David Strathairn brings quiet weight to Warren in the film’s flashback sequences. Adam Pally is wryly engaging as Sam, with one memorable aside involving a client who wanted an AI recreation of Hitler. A cameo by singer-songwriter Aimee Mann, performing two full songs, adds texture but also slightly derails what momentum the film has built.

The critical consensus, shaped largely by US critics, lands the film somewhere in a frustrated middle ground. Greg Archer at MovieWeb called it “one of the season’s sweetest charmers” and praised Bakalova for evoking “great compassion for her character.” But warmer notices like his are outnumbered by the more probing responses, which keep returning to the same wound: a premise this electric deserved braver hands.

O Horizon is, finally, a film about the comfort of artificial connection that is itself too comfortable. It would rather be liked than remembered. On this evidence, it will likely achieve both — and neither for very long.

★★½ / ★★★★★

O Horizon is now in New York theatres; it opens in Los Angeles on June 19.