Director clarifies Sentient is not inspired by The Collector

The CineLibri film-literature festival in Bulgaria screened Daniel Simpson’s dystopian thriller Sentient this week, presenting it as “inspired by The Collector” by John Fowles. But according to Simpson, that label isn’t quite right.

In an interview with Mediapool, the director said he never thought about the novel while making the film. “While creating Sentient, I didn’t think about that novel at all. Not once did it cross my mind,” he explained. The connection emerged later, after he finished the film and mentioned The Collector as one of his favourite books to someone at Cannes. When discussions began with the Bulgarian festival about a possible literary parallel, the book came up again.

Sentient is set in 2040, a world where humans have turned against androids after they took their jobs. The story follows Eve, a defective female household robot who must survive and often becomes a hostage to human impulses. Simpson says the only real overlap with Fowles’ novel is that, at one point, a female robot is held in a room.

Both works do share themes of obsession, control and loss of freedom. Simpson draws a parallel with the act of collecting: pinning a butterfly to a board means wanting to possess and categorise it. “In the modern world, everything seems to need to be labelled, categorised and put into frames,” he said. “In a sense, that is also a loss of freedom.”

The inspiration for the film came from elsewhere: a creepy doll Simpson acquired for another project, and his love of Japanese horror cinema. He first made a short film, China Doll, about a man who buys a sex doll that kills him after he mistreats her, then expanded the ideas into Sentient.

Published in 1963, The Collector tells of Frederick Clegg, a butterfly collector obsessed with art student Miranda Grey, whom he kidnaps. The novel explores class, freedom and the dehumanisation of the individual. For film fans in Bulgaria, Sentient offers a dark, thought-provoking look at a future where humanity’s fear of being replaced leads to violence — and asks whether our need to control and categorise could make us obsolete. It isn’t for everyone, but it’s a conversation starter.