Netflix's Shocking New Sci-Fi Series Is Way More Than The Sum Of Its Parts
Smart House meets Companion in this German thriller.
Netflix changed TV forever in a way very few people have noticed. While it was on the forefront of streaming and delivering broadcast- and theater-quality work to be enjoyed at home, it was also widening horizons across the globe. Because Netflix was a global service, the vast majority of its original series were available no matter where you were. It’s this phenomenon that led to the early success of international series like Dark and Money Heist. But it was the success of Squid Game in 2021 that really proved Netflix was spearheading the rise of international TV.
Now, stumbling on a foreign language series is just the same as finding any hidden gem, and a recent German series proves that you can find the most thrilling — and terrifying — stories where you least suspect.
Cassandra’s robot appearance is the perfect blend of retro-futurism and uncanny valley.
Cassandra, now streaming on Netflix, begins with a simple premise: a family moves into a home, only to find it was a long-abandoned prototype “smart home” from the 1970s. After a bit of fiddling, the teenage son Fynn (Joshua Kantara) manages to turn on AI home assistant Cassandra (Lavinia Wilson), an ever-smiling maternal figure who wakes up everyone with a song and is generally the perfect housekeeper.
However, things don’t stay ideal for long. Cassandra set her sights on mom Samira (Mina Tander), criticizing her parenting skills, framing her for negligent behavior, bringing up past trauma, and adding a fair amount of gaslighting to the AI girlbossery. It’s when Cassandra manages to convince young daughter Juno (Mary Tölle) to bring a deadly weapon to her school that things come to a head — and take a turn for the shocking.
Cassandra’s domestic tasks foreshadow her own evil past — and future.
Little by little, we learn bits and pieces about who Cassandra is, played by Wilson in flashbacks to the 1970s. Her story goes beyond just a dutiful mother who lent her personality to a domestic aid. Instead, her journey to creating Cassandra is more akin to something out of a John Carpenter movie, involving hidden murders, hate crimes, infidelity, and lots and lots of classic sci-fi gadgets and gizmos.
The story leans into the thriller aspects in the latter half, but never forgets where it started as a goofy story of a family learning to live alongside technology. There is still room for Juno to find self-confidence and mourn a lost family member, and for Fynn to move on from the friends he left in Hamburg and find love in a very adorable subplot involving a song about Tom Holland’s butt.
Whatever you think Cassandra is, it’s more. It’s funnier than it should be, more touching than the premise allows, and has some genuine rug-pull plot twists that, with the right fan following, could cement this as the next international hit. At the very least, it’s the perfect hidden gem.
