Review #952: 'Ex Machina' (2015)

Long-time movie scribe and author Alex Garland has taken a surprising amount of time to get into the director's chair. After penning scripts for Danny Boyle with The Beach (2000), 28 Days Later (2002) and Sunshine (2007), in addition to the haunting and highly underrated sci-fi drama Never Let Me Go (2010) and 2012's slightly underwhelming but suitably bad-ass Dredd, Garland's creativity must have surely been simmering when watching other directors bring his visions to life. The wait was well worth it, as his debut Ex Machina is a complex and bleak study of humanity and identity in a world where technology is evolving at rapid speed.

Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is a programmer at a Google-esque corporation called Bluebook, the world's most popular search engine. He wins a competition to spend a week with the company's founder, the reclusive yet enigmatic genius Nathan (a typically intense Oscar Isaac), and is whisked off to the multi-billionaire's home in the mountains. Nathan's attitude towards Caleb is in turns welcoming and passive aggressive, encouraging the wide-eyed young man to make himself at home yet quick to point out that certain areas of the house are strictly out-of-bounds. Caleb learns of his purpose when Nathan unveils his technological breakthrough - a robot with artificial intelligence named Ava (Alicia Vikander) - and is tasked with performing a Turing test to confirm Ava's ability to convince an assessor that she is human.

The tests are to be carried out in various stages, and consist of one-on-one conversations between Caleb and Ava between a glass window. Ava's beautiful and entirely human face betrays her hollow shell of a body, but she appears to be entirely human nonetheless, and her exchanges with Caleb bristle with a suppressed sexual tension. When she puts on a dress and a wig, he is reluctantly intrigued by her form, and she seems infinitely fascinated by him. Nathan clearly doesn't see anything wrong with such urges, as he made her with sexual organs capable of feeling pleasure after all. These themes of female identity and masculine desire play out against a backdrop of something more sinister. Frequent power cuts that befuddle Nathan and a fist-shaped crack in the glass allow the film to gather a momentum of building uncertainty.

As Nathan, Isaac is subtly intimidating. The type of man who walks around his spotless house in bare feet and shakes off hangovers by working out and chugging fruit juice, he is also unpredictable, arrogant, careless, and way more intelligent than anybody else. He may be small in stature, but Isaac's charisma chokes the screen. He also rocks an impressive beard and knows how to dance (as seen in one of the film's most bizarrely brilliant moments). Gleeson too is proving himself to be one of the most reliable young actors, holding the screen opposite the luminous Vikander is some of the film's most gripping scenes. Ex Machina depicts a dark future where the danger lies not with the seemingly limitless technological possibilities of today, but man's ability to exploit it. One of the most intelligent works of science-fiction in recent memory, Garland may just go on to do great things.


Directed by: Alex Garland
Starring: Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac, Sonoya Mizuno
Country: UK

Rating: ****

Tom Gillespie