Lily Sullivan

In Soulm8te (2026) Lily Sullivan plays a dead wife and the machine a widower buys to replace her, and the trick is how little she changes between the two. Sara, in the past, is loose and quick and a little careless with her husband. Lydia, the android, holds her shoulders a fraction too still and answers a fraction too promptly, and that is the whole of the difference. Most actors handed a robot go for the blank stare. Sullivan goes for good manners, and the film's best scenes are the ones in which David Rysdahl's widower stops noticing. She has said, "I wanted you to feel the silicone as much as possible", and we did, mostly through how polite it was.

The career behind that is short and has moved fast. She began at school, with a supporting part in Mental (2012) found through an open audition, and spent the middle of the decade in Australian features and television, with a recurring role in the American series Camp. The turn came in 2018, with television leads in Romper Stomper and Picnic at Hanging Rock, where she was Miranda Reid. Since 2022 the work has been genre and mostly lead: a solo performance in the one-location sci-fi thriller Monolith (2023), then Evil Dead Rise the same year, then Soulm8te, and a second film for Lee Cronin, The Mummy (2026).

Evil Dead Rise is the bigger film and the smaller part. Cronin casts her as Beth, a guitar technician who turns up at her sister's condemned Los Angeles flat on the wrong night. She is capable and dry, and the picture belongs to Alyssa Sutherland, who does the possession; the script gives Beth a piece of news of her own in the first scene and then forgets it for an hour, and Sullivan has to carry the forgetting. That is the pattern so far. Horror hires her for stamina, the running and the screaming and the long close-up, and she supplies it without fuss or excess. What she does better is smaller: the beat before a reaction, the reply that comes too soon. Lydia unsettled us more than anything in the Evil Dead film did, and the reason is that Sullivan never once let her do a thing a machine would not.

Cronin is the one director who has come back for her, and The Mummy will tell us whether he has found a part that uses the stillness as well as the stamina. Until then, Soulm8te is the one to click on: not for the film, which we did not much like, but for her, and for the two women in it who are nearly the same person.