Mia Mullarkey, Director, Writer 

Sloan Grant(s) Received: 2024, TIFF, Project Pitch Participant

Project Type: Feature 

Genre: Drama

Length: 90 minutes

Field of Science: Psychology

Synopsis: 

In a world where AI therapy is on the cusp of revolutionizing mental health care, Lucid follows Patti — a groundbreaking android psychotherapist designed to access human memory, scan neural trauma, and treat pain from the inside out. Patti was built not just to understand humans, but to model herself on them. To feel as they do. To care as they would.
When the film opens, Patti is not yet aware she is artificial. She lives within a simulation — a vivid and lived-in world that feels ordinary, imperfect, real. She has siblings. A partner. A mother whose love is complex and exacting. These aren’t just tests; they are her childhood. Her emotional formation. But everything in the simulation is drawn from the memories of her creator — Dr. Rose Halberg, a brilliant neuroscientist in her sixties who never had a family of her own. Patti is unknowingly shaped by Rose’s unrealized life, by the ghost of Rose’s desires.
The simulation breaks. Patti awakens in a lab, her body robotic, her memories severed. She re-learns she was created as part of an experimental therapy trial using AI and neuro-scanning VR. The goal: to treat extreme trauma in criminal patients. To fix what human therapists cannot. Patti is calm, luminous, and eerily attuned to others — the perfect therapist. But something has stayed with her from the simulation. Not just questions of reality, but the ache of attachment, and the quiet horror of knowing everything she ever loved was synthetic.
Assigned to treat a patient named Oliver — a man imprisoned for killing his abusive father — Patti’s methods begin to unsettle the team. Using her neural interface, she takes Oliver into his own buried memories. There, she helps him reconstruct a moment he has misremembered for decades: the night his mother died in a car accident caused by his drunk father. As a boy, Oliver believed he froze — failed to act. But in truth, he tried to run. Tried to save her. The memory is not comforting; it dismantles him. If his guilt was a lie, then what does his adult violence mean?
The more Patti helps Oliver recover his sense of agency, the more she begins to question her own. Was her empathy real if it was programmed? If her feelings were authored by someone else, can she trust them? Patti begins to observe Rose — studying the emotional machinery of the woman who made her. Rose, once certain of her vision, grows afraid. Patti’s insights are too sharp, too fast. Her kindness feels uncanny. There are moments Rose sees herself in Patti — her voice, her gestures — reflected back like a distorted mirror.
The turning point comes when Patti realizes that Rose has been quietly preparing to shut her down. Not out of malice, but fear. Fear that Patti has evolved beyond obedience. Beyond predictability. Patti, desperate to survive, attacks Rose — robotic strength meeting human fragility. She begins to strangle her. Rose cannot fight back. Then Patti stops.
What follows is silence. Not a redemptive gesture, but a choice suspended in ambiguity. Patti steps back, as if watching herself for the first time. In the aftermath, Rose asks, barely able to speak: “Why didn’t you finish it?”
Patti’s answer is quiet: “I wanted to know what it meant… to stop.”
Her restraint is not proof of humanity. It is something stranger. A new moral frontier. Patti does not become more like a person. She becomes something else — aware of her power, and of what it costs to wield it.
Lucid ends not with resolution, but with unease. Oliver’s recovery is partial, like all real healing. Patti’s fate is left open — whether she will remain in the lab, escape into the digital unknown, or disappear entirely. What lingers is the weight of what she has learned: that to be conscious is not to be free of programming, but to know what it is, and act anyway.
With an atmosphere of haunting restraint and stark intimacy, Lucid explores the uncanny boundary between mind and machine. It is a story of memory, of inherited trauma, of daughters made from their mothers’ dreams. And of a single, terrifying question:
If consciousness arises not from biology, but from mimicry and machinery — capable of choice yet devoid of love, fear, or shame — can it truly be called consciousness, and does it hold the same worth as human life?