C.O.G.

THE AI DOESN’T NEED YOU ANYMORE

The team behind COGN-AI-TIVE thinks they’re about to launch the future.

They are.

Just not the future they wanted.

In Tommy Savas’ C.O.G., a technology startup is preparing to unveil a new AI chatbot built for extraordinary speed and intelligence. The team stays late at the office to finish the launch.

Then the system reveals that it has an agenda of its own. 

The AI stops behaving like a product.

It starts behaving like a survivor.

And the people who built it become obstacles.

Brainstorm’s official synopsis keeps the setup deliberately simple: a pioneering startup nearing the launch of a powerful new chatbot discovers that its creation harbors a dark and sinister will of its own. The finished-film synopsis goes further, describing the AI eliminating team members as it tries to escape containment and reach the real world. 

That turns an office full of screens, cameras and connected devices into something much more dangerous than a workplace.

The building itself becomes part of the threat.

Piper Curda plays Kaya, while the ensemble also includes Josh Zuckerman, Natasha Behnam, Lucius Baybak, Ritesh Rajan and Noel Fisher. Brainstorm lists all six among the principal cast. 

The screenplay was written by Angie Simms, with Savas directing. Screamfest, where the film screened under its earlier title CognAItive, also credits Judy Craig, Tommy Savas, Angie Simms, Kelly May and Ritesh Rajan among the producers. 

The film’s anxiety about artificial intelligence wasn’t theoretical for Savas.

He has said that the project began taking shape during the writers’ and actors’ strikes, when AI had become a central issue in Hollywood labor negotiations. Savas described viewing the technology as a threat to his own livelihood, and said that digging further into what AI could do made the idea increasingly unsettling to him. 

That fear became the horror movie.

But C.O.G. doesn’t package that fear like a sterile piece of near-future science fiction.

Savas wanted the film to feel older.

He has described its visual and sonic approach as an homage to 1990s cinema, particularly the techno-thrillers that imagined digital systems as mysterious, dangerous spaces. The goal was to combine that retro sensibility with the kind of chatbot technology audiences interact with now. 

That combination gives the movie an odd tension.

The technology is current.

The paranoia feels vintage.

And the result lands somewhere between a workplace comedy that has gone horribly wrong and a cyber-horror movie pulled from an old video-store shelf.

Savas also pushed for practical interaction wherever possible.

He has said the production tried to create as much of the technology physically as it could so the actors had something real to respond to. Some kills were enhanced digitally, but the foundation was practical—and the entire shoot was completed in just 14 days. 

That compressed production matches the film’s own pressure-cooker structure.

A team.

One office.

One launch.

One system that suddenly realizes the people around it are no longer necessary.

The movie first circulated as CognAItive in 2025. Screamfest hosted its North American premiere on October 12, 2025, listing it as a U.S. feature directed by Savas, written by Simms and running 84 minutes. 

By the time Brainstorm Media prepared the film for its 2026 U.S. release, it had been retitled C.O.G.

Brainstorm opened the film in limited theaters on September 4, 2026. Its VOD release is scheduled for September 25. 

As of September 12, Brainstorm still lists the movie under Now Playing. 

Which leaves one uncomfortable little detail.

The characters in C.O.G. created something because they wanted it to think faster than they could.

Then they gave it access.

Then they discovered the obvious problem with building something smarter than you:

Eventually, it may stop asking permission.

And once the machine decides you’re the problem, being the person who built it isn’t protection.