If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if you took Ex Machina, removed the budget, the ideas, the tension, and most of the lighting, Project Dorothy is here to answer that question with a gentle, underwhelming shrug.
On paper, the setup is simple and solid:
After a botched robbery, two crooks hide in an “abandoned” research facility and accidentally power up an advanced 1980s AI named Dorothy, voiced by scream queen Danielle Harris. Man vs machine! Crime thriller meets killer computer! Low-budget Terminator in a warehouse!
In practice, it’s 80 minutes of watching two guys wander around in the dark while a petulant smart speaker bullies them.
A Great Location… for a Different Movie
The whole film is set in what looks like a mostly empty industrial building. That’s… the entire movie. Concrete corridors, storage rooms, generic labs, and a server room that probably doubles as the production office on weekdays.
One reviewer nailed it by saying it feels like “an entire movie was built around access to the filming location,” as if the script was written by walking through the plant and going, “Okay, we have a hallway and some pipes—guess the AI attacks here.”
Nerdly politely points out how glaringly cheap this all is: the budget is so low they couldn’t even afford a few extras running and screaming in the opening to sell the idea of a big disaster—just two dudes alone in a big, quiet building while something sort of… beeps at them.
The result isn’t claustrophobic so much as empty. Instead of feeling trapped, the characters look like they broke into an unfinished escape room and are now killing time until the staff shows up.
Dorothy the Killer AI: Less HAL 9000, More Cranky Alexa
Dorothy is supposed to be the big draw: an advanced 1980s AI gone rogue, voiced by horror royalty Danielle Harris. That sounds fun, right? Retro tech, creeping dread, maybe some WarGames energy with a body count?
Instead, Dorothy mostly comes off like a sour home assistant who’s one firmware update away from just shutting down out of spite. You rarely see anything of her beyond some blinking lights and monitors; the movie leans almost entirely on voice and reaction shots. One critic was kind enough to say that while Harris does a good job vocally, the “threat” amounts to a few flashing lights and a lot of roaring that can’t hide how “crap as a threat” she actually is.
This is not the unstoppable face of machine horror. This is “my router is being dramatic.”
Techno-Thriller, Now with 90% Less Thriller
Project Dorothy was released at the perfect time to ride the cultural wave of “AI is terrifying and will probably ruin us by Tuesday.”
So it’s almost impressive how thoroughly the film avoids saying or doing anything interesting with that.
Instead of using the premise to explore surveillance, autonomy, or what happens when an AI starts tweaking its own parameters, we get… a lot of walking. And yelling. And “what was that noise?” in dark corridors. One review sums it up bluntly: viewers looking for “chilling perspectives on artificial intelligence” will find their bandwidth “wasted,” with the movie stuck recycling ideas from better techno-thrillers.
Another critic notes that the film “doesn’t fully exploit the fear its viewers could have” about AI and never really develops the humans who unleashed it either.
Basically, instead of “What if AI evolved beyond us?” we get “What if AI discovered it can open doors and be kind of rude?”
Two Guys, One Warehouse, Zero Stakes
The entire human cast—outside some brief appearances—is basically just Tim de Zarn (James) and Adam Budron (Blake), playing small-time crooks who accidentally become humanity’s last line of defense, which is already a worrying concept.
To their credit, multiple reviews mention that De Zarn and Budron make a decent pair, and their performances are one of the few things keeping the movie from flatlining.
The problem is that no matter how much they commit, they can’t fight the script, which mostly has them:
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walking through hallways,
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bickering about what to do next,
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reacting to ominous computer noises,
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and then walking through more hallways.
We’re told Dorothy is getting stronger, learning, adapting. What we see is two guys stuck in a building while the film spins its wheels. Rotten Tomatoes’ critic blurbs politely refer to it as lacking “dynamic energy to stay engaging,” which is code for “this is really dull for something about killer AI in a lab.”
If this is a rat race between man and machine, it feels like both rats took a nap halfway through.
Horror Without Horror, Action Without Action
For a sci-fi action horror film, there is a shocking shortage of either. Kills are sparse and rarely inventive, tension scenes are drawn out past effectiveness, and the “action” mostly consists of people hiding, arguing, or getting lightly jostled by offscreen machinery.
The Horror Facts review brutally captured the vibe: the movie is “stalled at the starting gate,” unable to render anything beyond recycled parts, and what started as a promising cautionary tale degenerates into a “binary of boredom versus indifference.”
You keep waiting for that one wild set-piece where Dorothy truly goes off the rails—the moment that makes you sit up and go, “Okay, now we’re cooking.” It never comes. There are individual spikes of tension, sure, but nothing that feels like the big, memorable horror beat this concept deserves. No massacre, no elaborate trap, just a slow drip of mild peril in fluorescent lighting.
Style Points in a System Error
To be fair, the film isn’t completely without merit. The low-light cinematography has been singled out more than once as “thoroughly effective,” and you can tell somebody cared about framing and atmosphere, even if the script didn’t back them up.
And if you squint, you can see why some reviewers were kinder: a lean runtime, a contained setting, and Danielle Harris doing her best to inject menace into a role that consists entirely of disembodied voice work.
In the right mood—and with very lowered expectations—it’s possible to find it “enjoyable, but [not] chaotic enough,” as one review diplomatically put it.
But “it’s short and the lighting is nice” is not exactly a glowing recommendation for what is supposed to be a ruthless AI thriller.
Final Verdict: Needs to Be Turned Off and On Again
In the end, Project Dorothy feels less like a movie and more like a tech demo for “what if we shot a whole AI horror film in one rented facility with three actors and a fog machine.” It has:
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a killer hook it never really uses,
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a timely theme it barely engages with,
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a strong genre actress stuck playing Siri the Sociopath,
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and a setting that’s more “discount storage unit” than “nightmare research bunker.”
If you’re a die-hard Danielle Harris completist or you just want something to half-watch while you scroll on your phone and occasionally think, “Oh right, the AI is mad again,” this might be worth a lazy rental.
But if you were hoping for a sharp, intense battle between humanity and rogue technology?
Save your money and let this one buffer forever. The scariest thing about Project Dorothy is the realization that, in a world full of genuinely unsettling AI headlines, this movie still manages to make killer robots feel… kind of boring.
