EX MACHINA
Starring Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac
Directed by Alex Garland
It seems that speculative futures are getting closer all the time. Whereas sci-fi trappings once seemed far-fetched, they now hit extremely close to home.
A prime example of this would be this impressive directorial debut from Alex Garland, who previously penned Danny Boyle's Sunshine and 28 Days Later.
In this cautionary tale, we see Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a bright but meek code monkey, whisked away to the remote estate of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), an Oz-level tech wizard who's already launched a revolutionary search engine and has now moved on to refining artificial intelligence.
Caleb is to play guinea pig in an experiment that will put Ava (Alicia Vikander), Nathan's decidedly seductive AI creation who gets a Lauren Bacall-calibre entrance, to the Turing test and determine whether she's can demonstrate human-like consciousness.
While wrestling with his baser instincts (Who amongst us hasn't salivated over a new iPhone?), he begins to suspect that the mercurial Nathan may be dabbling in something more sinister.
Wedding a script that explores contemporary concerns – our apathy towards our private information and penchant for blindly agreeing terms of service – with a stripped down aesthetic indebted to '70s sci-fi, Garland balances instances of humour with insights concerning power dynamics, be they between the genders or the new breed of billionaire playboys and their servile acolytes.
Led by an in-form Isaac – who's affably bro-ing down one second and brandishing a deity's sadism the next – the cast powers through the script's occasionally clunky dialogue, allowing the calibrated-for-maximum-tension story mechanics to grip us. Calculated but never contrived, Garland's film ultimately leaves us with the unsettling sense that we've already dug our own dystopian grave.
