Mina Tander as Samira looking through city archives in Netflix's Cassandra.Image via Netflix
By
Kelcie Mattson
Published 29 minutes ago
Kelcie Mattson is a Senior Features author at Collider. Based in the Midwest, she also contributes Lists, reviews, and television recaps. A lifelong fan of niche sci-fi, epic fantasy, Final Girl horror, elaborate action, and witty detective fiction, becoming a pop culture devotee was inevitable once the Disney Renaissance, Turner Classic Movies, BBC period dramas, and her local library piqued her imagination.
Rarely seen without a book in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, Kelcie explores media history (especially older, foreign, and independent films) as much as possible. In her spare time, she enjoys RPG video games, amateur photography, and attending fan conventions with her Trekkie family.
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It takes a lot to dethrone a series as long-lasting and critically lauded as Black Mirror. Ever since Netflix acquired the production rights from Britain's Channel 4 network in 2014, creator Charlie Brooker's dystopian sci-fi anthology has evolved into a cultural focal point. Yet despite releasing its Emmy Award-nominated seventh season in early 2025, a new Netflix miniseries — an original IP solely dependent upon organic engagement — beat Black Mirror to the number one spot on streaming charts.
Cassandra, a German psychological thriller-horror sci-fi miniseries created by writer-director Benjamin Gutsche, has accumulated almost 200 million viewing hours to date and earned a perfect Tomatometer score. A vindictive AI terrorizing a hapless family evokes inevitable comparisons to M3GAN, Afraid, and 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Cassandra's half-malevolent and fully sympathetic robot possesses more soul and grit. Gutsche nimbly blends his genre hybrid into an addictive, suspenseful, and, at times, deeply unsettling family drama brimming with damaged characters and sophisticated gender commentary.
What Is 'Cassandra' About?
Fleeing a recent tragedy, married couple Samira (Mina Tander) and David (Michael Klammer) Prill and their two children, Fynn (Joshua Kantara) and Juno (Mary Tölle), move from the bustling city into an isolated country house. In addition to dust and mold, the home includes a startling bonus feature: a domestic service robot named Cassandra (Lavinia Wilson). Designed five decades earlier, Cassandra controls every inch of the property through a seamless smart home interface, making the Prills the new inheritors of highly advanced and experimental (for the '70s) technology.
After lying dormant for so long, the family's new multipurpose housekeeper, cook, calendar, and alarm clock proves excessively helpful. Cassandra's doting maternal nature might be legitimate where the pre-adolescent Juno and the teenage Fynn are concerned, but it takes mere days for her charitable mask to crumble, revealing her personality's equally prevalent flip side — manipulative jealousy, furious threats, and brutal violence. As Samira scrambles to protect her loved ones, flashbacks explain the flesh-and-blood origins of Cassandra's human avatar and the horrifying secrets about the house's former tenants, the Schmitts: Horst (Franz Hartwig), an adulterous husband and neglectful father, Peter (Elias Grünthal), his volatile son, and Cassandra, the heartbroken wife and mother who unwillingly gave a robot her face and feelings.
'Cassandra' Is a Tense and Compact Psychological Horror
the Cassandra bot whistles as she looks over her many sharp kitchen attachment toolsImage via Netflix
Easily bingeable at six episodes, Cassandra's tension slowly builds before accelerating on all cylinders in an urgent race to the finish. Although the limited series dabbles in scattered dark comedy, between the brisk pacing, sleek vintage sets, and riveting performances, circumstances that could otherwise fall apart as silly or overused instead adopt a sinister air. The early episodes establish the house's claustrophobic atmosphere, letting the Prills' paranoia increase in time with the situation's inherent dread — inherent, because Cassandra's virtual eyes and ears are inescapable to the point of omniscience. Her invasive cameras spy on the Prills during their most vulnerable moments and detect their every frightened whisper. By triggering a few system settings, she methodically designs murderous scenarios and thwarts the family's escape attempts. Cassandra's mutinous expressions — projected through a monitor that crowns her mechanical body — are her most human, while her Joker-esque attempts at smiling slide into the uncanny valley.
Cassandra requires some suspension of disbelief, but Gutsche's compact narrative leaves little room for logical fallacies or overt exposition, and plot contrivances are convenient by necessity, not egregious. The series also doesn't lose sight of its humanity for the sake of horrifying drama and whiplash twists. The concept and its ramifications could be Black Mirror's cousin: a sci-fi scenario that's currently improbable but not entirely unfeasible. The superb retrofuturistist production design and intricate practical effects provide the final cherry on top, enriching the environment and informing the backstory.
'Cassandra's Heartbroken Protagonist and Unsettling Gender Commentary Make It a Modern Gem
With some exceptions, Cassandra's tiny cast are multidimensional individuals trying to heal from grief who wind up harming their loved ones. The Pills share natural familial chemistry as well as that adrift feeling of a fractured unit navigating a defining loss. They stumble through their best efforts, retreat behind their emotional walls, and fail to address either their miscommunications or their respective unmet needs. There's emotional poignancy to Samira searching for peace within her art, or Juno, the most innocent, struggling with her self-confidence. Fynn, an aspiring musician who's also openly gay, misses both the friends and the progressive city that he didn't want to leave behind.
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Posts 2 By Roger Froilan Nov 6, 2025Yet Cassandra steals the show through a chilling and heartbreaking twist on the "more human than human" robot trope. Revealing specific details would ruin the full impact, but the human version of Cassandra bears the brunt of her series' darkest themes (school violence, brutal childbirth, death by suicide, and cancer). After sacrificing her career upon the altar of a dutiful homemaker, after enduring years of gaslighting, lies, and being overlooked, multiple outside forces strip away her autonomy. Her robotic self can supposedly meet her husband and son's every purported need, complete with a permanent false smile and without human limitations — and her domestic efforts still aren't enough for either man, who are by turns heedless, violent, or responsibility-shirking.
Cassandra is surrounded by family but encased in restrictive metal, severed from the affection of those she's broken her spirit and body to please. No prototype bells and whistles can compensate for a life condemned to unresolved trauma, terror, loss, righteous fury, and abandonment issues. It's little wonder she does everything in her power to prevent being rejected again, even if her methods ruin any chance of her regaining true reciprocal affection. Even at her most grisly, selfish, and ferocious, Cassandra's motivations deserve empathy. The series is grounded by Wilson's riveting performance in the past and the present: a sentient woman whose hollow eyes and jagged smile barely disguise her catastrophic despair. A modern social, sci-fi, and thriller gem, Cassandra deserves its success and more besides.
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