‘Soul Mates’ Review: Two Innocents Get Trapped in a ‘Saw’ Game as Online Date From Hell

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic Everywhere you look these days there are over-the-top horror movies, but the torture-porn genre of the “Saw” films — homicidal mutilation served up as a “game,” with life lessons thrown in — is more or less limited to the “Saw” franchise.

There haven’t been too many knockoffs of it. “Soul Mates,” however, has been unabashedly made in the carnival-of-ick mode of “Saw.” It even opens with two characters in handcuffs, wondering how they got to the dungeon in which they’re about to be toyed with like human lab rats.

Allison (Annie Ilonzeh) and Jason (Charlie Webb) wake up in the same bed, with metal bracelets on their wrists and a three-foot-long chain linking them together.

For a moment there’s a dear-God-WTF-did-I-do-last-night? vibe, but these two have, in fact, never met. At first she thinks he’s a predator who has kidnapped her, and she uses a lamp to fend him off.