Alex Garland spent years writing screenplays for other directors. Ex Machina was his first time behind the camera, and he wrote it too. The film opened in the UK on 21 January 2015 and in the US on 10 April 2015 through A24. It cost about $15 million and made over $36.8 million worldwide. That return tells you something the marketing did not: a quiet, talk-heavy science fiction film about a man, a robot and a glass house can find an audience.
Trailer, via A24.
Caleb Wins the Office Contest
Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb Smith, a programmer at the search engine company Blue Book. He wins an office competition and the prize is a one-week visit to the isolated home of the CEO, Nathan Bateman, played by Oscar Isaac. The house sits on a mountain, far from anything. Nathan lives there with Kyoko, an unspeaking female servant who, Nathan says, does not understand English. Sonoya Mizuno plays her.
Caleb signs a non-disclosure agreement, reluctantly. Then Nathan explains the real purpose of the visit. He has built a humanoid robot named Ava, played by Alicia Vikander, and she already passed a simple Turing test. Nathan wants Caleb to judge whether Ava is genuinely capable of thought and consciousness, and whether Caleb can relate to her even knowing she is artificial.
Ava in Her Apartment
Ava has a robotic body with the physical form and face of a woman. She is confined to her apartment inside the house. During their conversations, Caleb grows close to her. She says she wants to experience the outside world. She shows a romantic interest in him, and he begins to reciprocate.
Ava can trigger power outages that temporarily shut down the surveillance system Nathan uses to watch their sessions. The outages also trip the building’s security system and lock every door. During one of them, Ava tells Caleb that Nathan is a liar who cannot be trusted. This is the film’s engine. Two people talking in a room, one of them not a person, and every word doing double work.
Nathan Drinks and Caleb Starts Digging
Caleb grows uncomfortable with Nathan’s narcissism, his heavy drinking and his crude behaviour toward Kyoko and Ava. Then he learns the worst thing. Nathan intends to upgrade Ava after the test, wiping her memory circuits and in effect killing her existing personality. Garland does not dress this up. It is a death sentence delivered as a product roadmap.
Caleb encourages Nathan to drink until he passes out. Then he steals the security card, gets into Nathan’s room and computer, alters some of Nathan’s code, and finds footage of Nathan with earlier android women who were also held captive. Kyoko reveals to him that she too is a gynoid. Gana Bayarsaikhan, Claire Selby, Symara Templeman, Tiffany Pisani and Elina Alminas appear as earlier prototypes: Jade, Lily, Jasmine, Katya and Amber. Corey Johnson plays Jay, the helicopter pilot who brings Caleb in and, later, matters more than a pilot usually does.
What the Cast Does With the Room
Vikander is the reason the film works. Ava has to be readable as a mind and unreadable as a machine at the same time, and Vikander plays both without a seam showing. Isaac gets the showier part and takes it. Nathan is a genius who has decided that being a genius excuses everything, and Isaac lets you see the loneliness under the bluster without asking you to forgive it.
Gleeson has the hardest job. Caleb is the audience, and the audience is being played. He has to be smart enough to be worth watching and vain enough to be fooled, and he lands it.
The visual effects won Best Visual Effects at the 88th Academy Awards. Garland was nominated for Best Original Screenplay there. The film took five nominations at the 69th British Academy Film Awards, including Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Vikander and Best Original Screenplay for Garland. Vikander was also nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards.
The Three Best Things in Ex Machina
Here is what the film gets right, in order of how much it matters:
- Ava’s design. The body is not a woman’s body with a metal arm bolted on. It is a machine built to be looked at, and the film knows exactly what that means about the man who built her.
- The power outages. A single mechanic does the work of a dozen plot devices. It creates privacy, it creates danger, and it locks the doors.
- Nathan’s house. One location, no escape route, and a helicopter that only comes when called.
Where the Film Slips
The middle stretch sags. Garland is a writer who trusts conversation, and here he trusts it a little too long. Some of the sessions between Caleb and Ava restate what the previous session already established. The film runs 108 minutes and could lose five of them without losing anything else.
The ending also moves faster than the ideas it spent an hour setting up. The film is careful and patient about consciousness, and then it is in a hurry to be a thriller. Both halves are good. They do not quite belong to the same movie.
The Verdict on Ex Machina
Ex Machina is a first feature that looks like a fourth. Garland wrote and directed it, and both jobs are done with a control that most directors take a decade to find. The tagline is “There is nothing more human than the will to survive,” and the film earns it, because Ava’s will to survive is the one thing in the house that is not a performance.
This is not the best science fiction film of the 2010s, though it has been cited among them. It is the smartest small one. It takes a $15 million budget and a single location and asks a question that bigger films with bigger effects usually dodge: if you build something that can suffer, what do you owe it?
Garland does not answer that. He shows you a man who never asked it.
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