Netflix’s “Cassandra” is a Watchable Thriller That Flies Off the Rails

Credit: Netflix.

For years, Netflix has trotted out season after season of its hit series “Black Mirror", the British sci-fi anthology that tells tales of a dystopian future. While its first few seasons produced some memorable episodes about the war between man and machine, the series has veered into formulaic, predictable territory.

Despite technology like AI becoming an increasingly central part of our daily lives, “Black Mirror” is providing less effective commentary than in years past. Enter “Cassandra”, a new German limited series from Netflix, released in February. The series deals with many of the same themes as “Black Mirror” but its back and forth between past and present, and intriguing twists, make it feel fresh.

Searching for a new start after the death of her sister Kathi, Samira Prill (Mina Tander) and her young family move into a charming midcentury home in the German countryside. Samira is an artist who works from home, while her husband David (Michael Klammer), is a crime novelist. They’re aware that their new residence was an early type of smart home built in the 1970s, but believe the system has long been obsolete. The Prills' teenage son Fynn (Joshua Kantara), decides to fiddle around with the home’s server, awakening Cassandra, an omnipresent AI that can help with just about anything around the house, and takes physical form as an autonomous human-sized robot.

Cassandra gets to know the Prills, waking them up in the morning, helping them cook meals, and even offering life advice. But viewers quickly learn that something is off with the robot: Cassandra is capable of violence. In Episode 1, we see Cassandra run over a mouse, then lie to the Prill’s young daughter Juno (Mary Tölle) that the mouse was simply old and died of natural causes. It soon becomes clear that Cassandra is particularly threatened by Samira, seeking to draw a wedge between the mother and her family. 

At the end of Episode 1, we learn that Cassandra is not just an AI, but was based on a real woman, Cassandra Schmitt, the wife of the scientist who built the smart home. Across six episodes, the mystery of how Cassandra was turned into an AI smart house/robot is slowly revealed. In 1971, after discovering that she is terminally ill with Cancer, Cassandra and her husband Horst decide to test his experimental technology that would allow people to live forever. He hooks Cassandra’s brain up to a machine that allows her to control their home, as well as the physical body of a robot. Her consciousness lives on through the smart home and robot, even when the real Cassandra passes away. It sounds ridiculous, but solid performances from Lavinia Wilson as Cassandra and Franz Hartwig as Horst make it almost believable.

Though technology is at the core of “Cassandra,” the show is more interested in what's human. The grief the Prills feel over Kathi, Fynn’s struggles as a gay teen, and David’s insecurities about his writing are genuinely interesting. It also helps that Cassandra, while menacing and conniving, is extremely funny. In one scene, the robot quips to Samira that her big head was blocking her view. In another, she embarrasses Samira by telling Juno that her mother doesn’t have a real job like her father; it’s cruel, but also silly.

Around episode 4, plot details start to veer into soapy territory. At one point, Cassandra instructs Juno to bring a gun to school to scare a classmate. Then later, a mean classmate of Juno’s is nearly burned to death in the Prill home by Cassandra during a play date, sending Samira, who was chaperoning, to a mental institution. And the big reveal—that the real Cassandra secretly gave birth to a disabled daughter whom her husband convinced her to hide from the world, raising her in a hidden room inside the home—is dizzying. 

By the season’s end, the true motivation behind Cassandra’s reign of terror on the Prills becomes clear. The real Cassandra was just like any other mother, trying her best to protect her children from a cruel world. And her AI counterpart, abandoned for so long, will stop at nothing to have another family to care for. In the final two episodes, the show turns into a predictable kind of techno-thriller, as Cassandra locks David and the children in the home, desperate to keep the Prills under her watchful eye. Their hero is Samira, who breaks out of the mental institution to save her family. After she convinces Cassandra to let them go, the AI self-destructs, setting the house on fire.

“Cassandra” doesn’t quite avoid all the pitfalls of the modern sci-fi thriller— the technology is nonsensical, and it often tries to shock you more than make you think— but the gendered family dynamics and commentary about how far a mother will go to protect her children are touching. If you can ignore some of the wonky plot details, it is one of the most watchable series of the year.