Black Eyed Susan 2024

Desperate for work, Derek accepts a job replacing his recently-deceased friend at a tech startup. Continuing to develop the company’s innovative project means working intimately with Susan, a bleeding-edge BDSM sex doll meant to receive and appreciate punishment as an integral part of her evolving AI. Derek will soon test the limits of his own desires and explore the nature of man and woman, pleasure and pain, and life and death in a morally uncertain future world.

Review

After 21 years, filmmaker Scooter McCrae has returned with his latest feature film Black Eyed Susan, which had its world premiere at the 2024 Fantasia International Film Festival. However, whatever transgressive edge he once had has dulled, as his latest film is a shallow attempt to discuss issues of toxic masculinity, addiction, and the terrifying possibilities of artificial intelligence.

Damian Maffei plays Derek, a down-on-his-luck ride-share driver who lives out of his car and is recently separated from his wife, presumably spurred on by his alcoholism. Serendipitously, he crosses paths with an old friend, Gilbert (Marc Romeo), who offers him a job: to help test and develop a new BDSM sex doll named Susan (Yvonne Emilie Thälker). More specifically, Derek is meant to train Susan’s A.I. in what men want and how to fulfill those desires. And those desires are presumed to almost always be violent in nature.