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In O Horizon, a Chatbot Promises to Take the Pain Out of Bereavement

Madeleine Rotzler’s new film, O Horizon, offers an odd vision of dystopia, even as it’s billed as a “sci-fi comedy drama.” The film itself is not always much to look at, but sometimes a film in its very strangeness can reveal a great deal, precisely because of all that it obscures. After all, so much of what matters these days is happening out of sight, suppressed by algorithms, hostile media, and even more hostile governments, and increasingly one must learn to look under the surface of simple things. Rotzler’s film gets its title from the layer of decomposed plant matter on the forest floor, the “O horizon,” but it’s what’s lying beneath O Horizon that truly matters.In a near-future New York, Abby (Maria Bakalova) works in a neuroscience lab tracking the brain waves of monkeys, struggling to deal with the recent death of her father, played by David Strathairn. An intrusive, Siri-like AI assistant encourages her to visit a shabby-looking tech start-up called Seeking a Friend Store; there, a lone employee played by Adam Palley offers to recreate someone you’ve lost or are missing. After uploading a parcel of photos, documents, and other archival material to its servers, the company creates a digital avatar that you can call on your phone whenever you like. After some initial reluctance, Abby creates a digital version of her dead dad, and soon begins talking to it as a means of managing her grief as she tries to go forward in her life.As an AI chatbot, her dead father acts like all AI chatbots: supportive, deferential, complimentary. The AI is always there with a new prompt to fill up dead air (“Tell me something fun that happened today,” “What’re you up to tonight? Having fun?”) or a little ego boost (“Dr. Williams is so lucky to have you. You’re excellent.… Somehow you’ve managed to develop excellence in all that you do. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”). It’s always working to keep her engaged and affirmed, and anytime there’s any friction between the two of them, it backs off, eager to keep her on the line. If Strathairn’s dialogue wasn’t actually written by ChatGPT, the script does an excellent job of imitating it, and the bot’s lines have all the hallmarks of an LLM: cloying and irritatingly sentimental.These are strange scenes. For narcissists, incels, and sociopaths, the appeal of a chatbot is that it will always tells them exactly what they want to hear, so you can imagine how uncomfortable it is to listen to such a thing telling someone else what they want to hear. As the platitudes and clichés dribble out of Abby’s phone, not even an actor with Strathairn’s delivery can save them.We never learn how much Abby pays for her subscription, but in real life these businesses have a financial incentive to get their users hooked, so to speak, on their product. As Mary-Frances O’Connor, professor of clinical psychology at University of Arizona, told Scientific American’s David Berreby in 2025, the danger here is that people struggling with grief can be uniquely vulnerable to Big Tech’s long-honed engagement and gamification strategies. Researcher Nore Lindemann has further noted that “users are likely to become dependent on their bots, which may make them susceptible to surreptitious advertising by deathbot providing companies and may limit their autonomy.” That vulnerability offers real possibilities. For emerging companies like You, Only Virtual, HereAfter AI, Super Brain, and Silicon Intelligence, grief represents an exciting new market. Researchers are already beginning to identify the obvious financial incentives for such companies to alter the “informational bodies” of the dead to increase engagement and revenue. Rather than moving people through the process of grieving, AI companies would seem to benefit more from keeping them in the phase of acute bereavement, distorting their memories to give them what they want, all the while promising the false allure of being perpetually free of loss. Indeed, one wonders if Abby’s dad was really this asinine in life, or if Seeking a Friend Store has already tweaked his personality to keep her paying subscription fees.While Rotzler’s movie doesn’t much explore the ethical implications of what it might mean to get addicted to a product that promises to take the pain away, it does depict what a world without pain might look like. And it turns out to be a truly banal one. For it’s not just the dialogue. Strathairn’s chatbot doesn’t push back or try to challenge or trouble Abby in any way, and strangely, O Horizon’s plot does not try to challenge or trouble the viewer, either. Throughout its hundred-minute run time, hardly anything happens. There is no real conflict, no real rising tension, no climax, no real denouement. O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback.At one point, the AI develops the ability to call Abby of its own initiative—you think this may signal a turn in the narrative, some malevolent warning about technology getting out of control, but it doesn’t. At another point, Abby begins dating a man named Douglas (Avi Nash), and the viewer thinks maybe he will turn out to be a jerk, but he doesn’t. The viewer thinks perhaps her AI dead father will get jealous, or otherwise turn haywire. He doesn’t. You may think Abby will have to learn to let go of her father to be with her boyfriend, but she doesn’t! The few conflicts that do arise have such low stakes that they are resolved within minutes and forgotten almost immediately. No character conflict has any kind of lasting ramification or seems to matter for any serious length of time. Anytime it seems like there might be any kind of friction, the plot backs off.It’s as if the story is as deferential and sycophantic as AI itself. O Horizon gives you what AI thinks you want: no struggle, no tension, nothing unpleasant, no pushback. It is a movie made by real humans, but it feels like it’s made by AI, made without an awareness of what makes film interesting or ultimately pleasurable. For one of the most basic reasons we experience narrative art, be it a film or a novel or a television show, is some kind of tension, some kind of drama. No one actually wants a smooth, flat surface. We do not want art to smile placidly back at us for one hundred minutes telling us we’re excellent, that the world is lucky to have us, that nothing matters.We’ve known this for thousands of years; it’s one of the most basic lessons of Aristotle’s Poetics. Catharsis—the purging of negative emotions that happens through the experience of watching something difficult; of dealing with a character’s actual pain and suffering; of being engaged with issues of actual tension, drama, hardship, impossible decisions, insurmountable odds, tragedy, and resolve in the face of despair—matters not just because it allows us a safe venue to release these emotions, but because it gives us perspective on our own troubles and hardships. Grappling with pain through art is one of those very existential things that makes us human, that allows us to experience the world fresh and anew. That word itself—catharsis—has remained so elusive since Aristotle’s days, so hard to pin down, precisely because it’s hard to say exactly what it is we need from great art. There is no simple definition, no easy formula, no predictable algorithm that can deliver it to us. It seems cheesy to have to say this, but we live at a moment when AI-generated art that fails to deliver this is being passed off as legitimate, and sometimes just stating the obvious becomes an act of resistance against this dreck.Dulled of sensation, the world of O Horizon is emptied. The same opiate that griefbots would offer the grieving, Rotzler’s narrative offers her viewers: soporific, painless.In a strange way, the fantasy of painlessness is particularly fraught for Rotzler. Her previous films appeared under her maiden name, Sackler. Her grandfather, Raymond Sackler, was one of three brothers who founded Purdue Pharma, the pharmaceutical company behind OxyContin; her father, Jonathan, sat on its board and was its vice president for years.While Rotzler herself has never worked for Purdue Pharma, in 2023 Artnet reported that a number of the production crew of O Horizon became uncomfortable during filming, viewing Abby’s relationship with her father as being an autobiographical depiction of Rotzler’s relationship with her own father, who died in 2020, and an attempt to whitewash his image.In the decades when Jonathan Sackler was involved with Purdue Pharma, it generated billions of dollars by distributing Oxycontin throughout the United States and abroad. In 2007, the company pleaded guilty to misleading the public about the addictive properties of OxyContin, and the year Jonathan died the company reached a settlement in which it admitted that for years it had “knowingly and intentionally conspired and agreed with others to aid and abet” doctors in dispensing the drug “without a legitimate medical purpose.” (The consulting firm McKinsey & Company additionally agreed in 2024 to a $650 million settlement for its work in helping “turbocharge” Purdue’s sales of OxyContin during the epidemic.) The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that between 1999 and 2018 alone, 450,000 Americans died from opioid overdoses.The father of O Horizon is a kindly, generous man—a sculptor, a fan of David Bowie, and a reader of scientific journals. It was this depiction that apparently caused friction among the crew during filming. “The script is extremely parallel to Madeleine’s experience of the loss of her dad, and clearly very related to what he did with drugs,” set dresser Caroline Pigou told Artnet. “Everyone on the crew would talk about how fucked up and weird it was that this movie was getting made in the first place.”Rotzler has insisted that the film is not autobiographical. “This film is about artificial intelligence and there are no parallels between my father or his work and the characters in the film,” she told Artnet through a representative. Fine. That’s her take. Still, the film’s theme of painlessness is one that resonates with the family business of selling pain relief; and the film’s obliviousness to the shallowness of the AI bot’s consolations echoes with Purdue’s years of denying the dangers of its opioids.Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain.It’s not the first time Rotzler has proven determined to ignore the ways in which her films might seem to audiences to be in conversation with her family’s scandals. In a New Yorker feature on her earlier work, the documentary It’s a Hard Truth Ain’t It and the feature O.G., both filmed inside an actual penitentiary in Indiana, Nick Paumgarten wrote that “one might suppose that Sackler’s concern and sympathy for the incarcerated is some kind of expiation,” given that so many incarcerated Americans are there for opioid-related offenses, but she “thinks this is baloney.… It pains her to think that the perception of her project, and of the hard work of everyone involved, would be tainted in some way by her pedigree.” In Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, Patrick Radden Keefe relates how Jeffrey Wright, the star of O.G., emailed her before the film opened, asking her to address the “elephant” in the room: why so many of the men were in the prison where they’d been filming. “You never spoke to me about any of that. I was aware and only once tried to broach the subject with you. You didn’t open up about it.” As the premiere approached, Wright wanted to know: “Do you think you should take into consideration that this will become part of the dialogue around these films?” According to Keefe, she never wrote Wright back.If there’s an animating impulse in O Horizon beneath its facile resolution of grief, it’s denial: the steadfast inability to contemplate how this story of a daughter conjuring a smoother, simpler version of her late father might play to audiences who have followed years of news of the opioid epidemic and the Sacklers’ central role in it.O Horizon is not much of a thing in and of itself. But it offers an almost perfect distillation of our relationship to pain in 2026. Everywhere, it seems, we are faced with bullshit technology and bad art that offer false promises to take away all our pain, all the while completely misunderstanding what that pain is, why we suffer it, and what it means to actually endure it.Rotzler’s uncle Richard Sackler once wrote of those overdosing from his company’s drug, “These are criminals.… Why should they be entitled to our sympathies?” Why indeed. I think of Susan Crathern, whose son Kevin broke two teeth on the playground when he was 10 and was given OxyContin for the pain, his mother assured by the dentist that it was not addictive. Ten years later, he died from an accidental overdose after years of struggling from addiction. In her 2020 testimony to Congress on the damage wrought by the opioid crisis, Crathern wrote: “In my mind his death is a truth that can’t be true.”This is how grief actually is for too many people, down in the wreckage, where it is a paradox that can’t easily be solved, one that can’t be glibly assuaged with pabulum and clichés, a thing not to be solved with subscription fees, engagement algorithms, and prefabricated compliments but faced with rage and guilt and sorrow and carried every day without reprieve. For too many people’s lived reality, grief is the unimaginable weight of memories, the ugly truth that can’t be true. There’s no money to be made from it, so it gets hidden away, pushed down out of sight, past the detritus, down here, below the horizon.