Director: Alex Garland
Writer: Alex Garland
Cast: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander
Runtime: 108 mins.
2015
It's hard to know what to call Ex Machina. Sci-fi, of course, that goes without saying. It's about a young programmer named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) who wins a mysterious contest that lets him spend a week with his reclusive boss Nathan (Oscar Isaac), only to discover that the purpose of his visit is to test Nathan's brilliant AI creation Ava (Alicia Vikander), to see whether she passes Nathan's version of the Turing Test. That's prime sci-fi material. But beyond that? Beyond that it gets messy.
Sometimes Ex Machina feels like a drama, a philosophical film of ideas. Sometimes it feels like a romance. Sometimes a coming of age story. Sometimes suspense, or even horror. The film's toe-dipping in all these different genres tends to correspond with revelation of information--how much we understand about the situation, plot, and characters at any given moment. I just said the movie "gets messy," but perhaps I should have chosen a different phrase, because Ex Machina is a masterclass of tight narrative and tonal control. It doesn't feel like a romance sometimes and horror other times because the storytelling is slapdash or undisciplined. The dipping in and out of genres is part of writer/director Alex Garland's master plan to jerk us around until we're forced to realize nasty things about ourselves and our assumptions that we should have already known. Ex Machina is an exercise in empathy that troubles us to our core.
