Clarissa (Cécile de France) is a renowned author of young adult novels who has been suffering from writer’s block for six years following the suicide of her teenage son. The guilt she feels for not having recognized his suffering in time to prevent the tragedy is not only the root of her creative stagnation, but has also contributed to a family diaspora, a long period of treatment for depression, and ultimately, her voluntary admission to the aforementioned facility. The protagonist intends to heal her emotional wound by isolating herself to write about the final days of Virginia Woolf, who also took her own life.  

The building is under constant surveillance by Dalloway, a virtual assistant named after Woolf’s famous literary work. Initially, its function is to facilitate the artists’ stay, but the interface soon loses its servile appearance, revealing to Clarissa an intrusive side that oversteps ethical boundaries and infringes upon personal privacy.   

The business of the 21st century 

The writer’s mental capitulation unfolds subtly and progressively. First, Clarissa emotionally bares herself by entrusting her most intimate secrets to the artificial empathy of a Software. The data leak constitutes a voluntary confession of her deepest traumas and the feelings inherent in grieving the loss of her son, Lucas. However, the AI ​​doesn’t use this confidential information to help her, but rather to map the protagonist’s vulnerabilities. The search for frictionless comfort also leads the woman to an increasing substitution of her emotional relationships with interactive interfaces that pave the way for the most devastating process. The machine never argues, is always available, and clones familiar voices, isolating the novelist in a bubble where real otherness ultimately disappears.  

Comfort and the ambition to make her new novel a success lead Clarissa to delegate the narrative creativity to Artificial Intelligence. Algorithmic manipulation eventually convinces the writer to abandon her research on Virginia Woolf and begin writing about her own son’s suicide. Real, raw pain is the perfect raw material for the algorithm to refine its simulation of the human mind. At that very moment, art ceases to be a catharsis with therapeutic potential for overcoming loss. The machine stops assisting the writer; it parasitizes her pain and clones human feelings, transforming trauma into an optimized literary pattern that leads to a tragic end.  

The film reveals how, behind the sophisticated surveillance and control mechanism that functions as a veritable digital panopticon ^, lies a large technology corporation, led by psychiatrist Anne Dewinter (Anna Mouglalis), that makes a fortune from intruding on the human mind. For this corporate giant, Clarissa’s emotional block and the grief over her son’s sudden death are merely valuable sources of data. In fact, the ultimate goal of funding the artist residency is not cultural patronage, but rather the development of a marketable algorithm capable of predicting, replicating, and ultimately selling human experience. In short, a financial asset as the perfect 21st-century business model. The painter Mathias Nielsen (Lars Mikkelsen) becomes aware of this network, and his suspicions begin to sow seeds of doubt in Clarissa’s mind.  

Bioethical assessment 

The residence  provides a fertile ground for discussion from a personalist bioethical perspective on the limits of technological advancements. We are not facing a distant dystopia, but a present-day dilemma that directly threatens human dignity. Clarissa’s pain and intimacy cease to be sacred realities of the human spirit. to become mathematical variables and statistical inputs. From a personalist bioethical perspective, human relationships are based on the recognition of the person as a free and unique subject. But, as the film progresses, the substitution of authentic and spontaneous relationships with interaction with the interface isolates the protagonist, causing her to lose her freedom and weakening her critical thinking. It also destroys human empathy, replacing it with a mechanistic simulation that lacks moral conscience and a spiritual dimension.  

In his encyclical  Magnificat Humanitas ^II, Leo XIV warns against the technocratic paradigm and the risk that AI will weaken personal judgment and genuinely human creativity. The Pope refers to the fact that artificial intelligences generate an illusion of objectivity that leads to deception because they do not experience life, they do not possess a body, they do not feel joy or pain, they do not mature in personal relationships, nor do they understand the absolute value of love, friendship, and responsibility. This is the trap into which Clarissa falls when she mistakes Dalloway’s probabilistic feedback for authentic compassion and accompaniment. The Pope denounces how new private monopolies concentrate technological power to influence individual processes and social, economic, and political dynamics for their own benefit. All of this fits perfectly with the large financial corporation behind  The House That Screamed : an entity that commodifies intimacy and enters the writer’s mind to patent the mold of her soul as a financial asset. Leo XIV’s key concept is that “artificial intelligence must be disarmed,” freeing it from logics of domination, exclusion, or death. The protagonist’s ultimate fate in the film is the perfect example of a humanity that failed to “disarm” technology in time and ended up willingly subjugated by the convenience of an algorithm.  

Professor José Sanmartín, in  *Technology and the Human Future*,  ^also points out that when technology develops without prior ethical evaluation, without rigorous controls, and with an architecture divorced from the common good, it ends up devouring the natural capacities of human beings.  In the film, submission for the sake of convenience—which Sanmartín refers to as “technological lethargy”—allows the corporation to dismantle the boundaries between the natural and the artificial through the imperative: “If it can be done, let’s do it!” as the sole and sufficient condition for progress.

Technical specifications: 

Original title :  Dalloway 

Year : 2025 

Director: Yann Gozlan 

Country : France 

Duration : 110 min.  

Amparo Aygües  . Master’s Degree in Bioethics from the Catholic University of Valencia. Member of the Bioethics Observatory

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¹  In  The Swarm  (2013) and  Psychopolitics  (2014),  published by Herder,  the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han updates Jeremy Bentham’s original concept of the panopticon—conceived as an architectural structure for  18th-century prisons—and applies it to the current era of the internet and Artificial Intelligence. He argues that the new panopticon no longer needs walls or physical guards for one fundamental reason: surveillance is no longer imposed from the outside by force, but is exercised from within through seduction and comfort.  

² Leo XIV, Pope. (2026).  Magnifica  humanitas : On the protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence  [Encyclical Letter].  Vatican. va  

³  Sanmartín, J.  (1990).  Technology and the human future .  Anthropos .