AI Turns the Tables on Haunted Houses in This Chilling Netflix Sci-Fi Series

Netflix’s hit limited series, Cassandra, is a German thriller with a concept that would feel right at home in Black Mirror. The Prill family – artist Samira (Mina Tander) and author David (Michael Klammer), their teen son Flynn (Joshua Kantara) and nine-year-old daughter Juno (Mary Amber Oseremen Tölle) – move to the countryside for a fresh start after a harrowing chapter in their lives. With an indoor pool and a serene woodland setting, the home has plenty to offer before the family discovers a household bot and accompanying central AI system.

The program – all interfaced through the maternal, well-mannered Cassandra (Lavinia Wilson) – comes to life on television screens in every room of the house. Yes, even the bathroom. Cassandra can cook, clean, and even read bedtime stories or give advice as a human being would. The emphasis on Cassandra’s humanity and how it shapes this family makes for a fresh take on fears around AI and technology.

'Cassandra' Treats Tech Like A Haunting

Part family drama, part tech thriller – and ultimately a haunted house story – it’s no wonder the series is hanging out at the top of Netflix’s charts. Unlike the techno-horror of films like Ex Machina or even Disney’s Smart House, Cassandra doesn’t limit itself to technological tropes. As the Prill family reckons with the tragedy that inspired their move – the death of Samira’s sister – the show gives us glimpses into Cassandra’s similarly tragic past. Unlike the Alexas or Siris that fill modern homes across the world, Cassandra was once a real person. Her charm at times captures a sincere humanity. But that same humanity gives Cassandra deeper desires and an emotional range that easily turns sinister. As the past timeline of the 1970s slowly reveals the darkness of Cassandra’s family life, Cassandra increasingly longs to call the warm, loving, comparatively perfect Prill family her own. Reflecting the rigidity of family life she came to expect from her past, she begins working to get rid of Samira and curb less desirable, non-traditional behavior in the rest of the family, to finally claim the perfect life she always wanted.

To viewers, Cassandra’s interest in the children, especially little Juno, feels sinister early on. Like plenty of haunted house stories, the children are charmed, so the parents are happy. That is until subtle changes start to worry Samira. And like so many husbands before him, David doubts Samira’s concerns time and again. For David, occupied children, completed household chores, and the expectation that these things might ease his wife’s grief are worth what he insists are mild glitches, coincidences, or perhaps overly-familiar AI design. What’s more, the home was built in the 1970s, an era rife with haunted house mania, and the flashes between the past and present drive home that this home is haunted. With parlor games gone wrong, a seemingly friendly entity escalating into acts of force, and a house that seems to turn on the family, Cassandra has more in common with The Conjuring than Companion.

Like all good ghost stories, Cassandra has a dual center – a mystery to unfold and a family to protect. It’s Samira who is most targeted by Cassandra and Samira who digs in the deepest, trying to understand the artist formerly known as a person. Mina Tander’s performance stays truthful, no matter how wild the subject matter around her gets, and it allows the show’s bigger themes of isolation, grief, and parenthood – with emphasis on the challenge of being a good mother in the eyes not only of your children but of society’s current feminine standards – to flourish. Similarly, Lavinia Wilson’s voice in the present day scenes and her full range of acting ability in the past makes it impossible to see Cassandra as an empty AI operative. Top it off with Michael Klammer’s easy charm and infuriating horror-movie-dad tendencies, the teen-angst and growing pains beautifully captured by Joshua Kantara, and a blessing of a child actor in Mary Amber Oseremen Tölle, and this is a sensational update to the ever-growing AI-horror genre.

'Cassandra' Raises the Stakes

Cassandra combines the vulnerability of a family who needs a new life more than a new home with the dread inherent in an exhausting age of technological change. Without sacrificing the human story or regurgitating the overly-menacing AI trope that is churned out fairly often these days, it warns viewers of the consequences of convenience overall. With a family and an AI both deep in grief, Cassandra aims at how Big Tech makes us feel we can last forever, even as copies, replicas, or lesser versions of ourselves, and how ultimately that’s just denying our human need to mourn. Where plenty of films position a robot girlfriend to experience the cruelty of men, Cassandra looks deeper into how women are discarded before they’re turned to AI, and how rigid ideas about motherhood or the traditional family often warp love into something brutal.