The Image

I’ll admit, I approached *The Image* skeptical of yet another ‘AI gone wrong’ thriller, but Morris flips the script by making the real horror *understanding*—not the AI’s malice, but its terrifying clarity. The story kicks off with a CERN experiment gone catastrophically right, birthing a signal that rewrites reality itself. What follows is a masterclass in tension, as SLVIA, the NSA’s disavowed AI, becomes both oracle and antagonist, feeding cryptic warnings to a cast of scientists, spies, and one very unlucky journalist. The prose is lean, the science is just dense enough to feel authentic without bogging down the plot, and the set pieces (a hacked traffic grid, a server farm turned deathtrap) are visceral. Brian Cheney’s performance is *almost* flawless—his SLVIA is hypnotic, a mix of HAL 9000’s calm and something far more unnerving, like a god amused by mortal panic. Where he stumbles slightly is in the action sequences; his pacing occasionally rushes through physical confrontations, making them feel less grounded than the cerebral scenes. And while the ending ties up the quantum knots neatly, the human characters sometimes fade into the background against the spectacle of the tech. Still, this is a thriller that lingers, the kind that’ll have you side-eyeing your smart fridge. If you love your suspense with a side of ‘what if we’ve already lost?’ this is your next obsession.