The verdict
Small, precise and genuinely unsettling, with the discipline to end when it should.
Quick facts
- Written by
- Alex Garland
- Released
- 2014
- Runtime
- 1 hour 48 minutes
- Starring
- Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, Oscar Isaac
- Awards
- Academy Award for visual effects
- Where to watch
- Amazon Prime Video
- Genre
- Science fiction
Director Alex Garland
Ex Machina is Alex Garland’s 2014 film about a young programmer sent to a remote house to run a test on an artificial intelligence, and about the fact that the test has two subjects. It has a cast of four, one house and no action sequences, and it is one of the most tightly constructed science fiction films of the decade.
The idea behind it
Garland’s question is not whether the machine is conscious. It is whether a man who keeps a conscious machine in a locked room is in a position to judge, and the film answers that by making the man the least trustworthy intelligence in it.
The framing device is the test. Caleb is asked to administer a variation on the Turing test to Ava, and the film stays inside that structure, which is why it feels closer to a play than a thriller. Everything that matters happens in conversation.
The story, spoiler-light
Caleb wins a staff competition to spend a week at the home of the company’s founder, Nathan, who has built a humanoid machine called Ava. Caleb’s job is to decide whether she can think, and Nathan watches the sessions on monitors with the casual confidence of a man who has already decided the answer.
Two things are worth knowing before you start. First, the film is a machine with three gears and it tells you how it works almost immediately: pay attention to who is being watched and who is doing the watching. Second, it is a film about a very specific kind of arrogance, and Nathan is the clearest example of it in recent cinema.
What makes it science fiction
It takes the practical problem of building a mind seriously. The intelligence is deliberately built from data, a search engine’s worth of human behaviour, and the film allows the unpleasant implication of that to sit unexamined for most of its runtime before turning it into the ending. The production design does the rest: the house is beautiful and sealed, and the machinery is domestic rather than laboratory, which makes it worse.
The film is also unusually interested in bodies. Ava is visibly manufactured, her face and hands are human and the rest is not, and the film uses that to keep the audience uncomfortable in exactly the way it intends. There is no attempt to make her seamless, and that is the point.
Who should watch it, and who should skip it
Watch it if you like chamber pieces, arguments and films that trust four actors and one location to carry everything. It runs barely a hundred minutes and does not waste a scene.
Skip it if you want warmth, or a single likeable character, or anything that resolves generously. It is a cold film with a cold ending, and it is entirely deliberate about that. There is also a strip of nudity and some violence, so it is not a family film.
Where to watch it
It is available on Amazon Prime Video, and on the usual digital stores to buy or rent. It loses nothing on a small screen, since almost all of it happens in two rooms.
The verdict
Small, precise and genuinely unsettling, with the discipline to end when it should. One of the best AI films because it is about the people in the room rather than the machine.
Frequently asked questions
How long is Ex Machina, and where can I watch it?
One hour and forty-eight minutes. It is streaming on Amazon Prime Video and available to buy or rent on the usual digital stores.
Is it connected to Garland’s other films?
Not directly, but the concerns are continuous. He has spent his career on artificial minds and human cruelty, and this is the first film he directed rather than only wrote.
Did it win any awards?
It won the Academy Award for visual effects, which is remarkable for a film made for a fraction of the budget of the other nominees, and Ava was built with a combination of performance and effects work rather than a suit.
Is it too disturbing to watch?
It is tense rather than graphic. The discomfort comes from the situation and from what is implied about how Ava was built, not from what is shown, though there is one violent scene and brief nudity.
Is there a sequel?
No. It is a self-contained film and the ending deliberately forecloses one.