If you’ve seen any of the ads for writer Alex Garland’s (28 Days Later, Dredd) first film as a director, Ex Machina, then you know that it’s one of those robot movies that explores the murky boundaries between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. The basic setup is that Oscar Isaac is playing a genius tech billionaire type called Nathan, he’s created a robotic woman called Ava (Alicia Vikander), and he’s hired an intelligent but slightly nebbish man called Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) to test out the limits of her intelligence and determine whether she really is a fully realized consciousness, or just a very convincing approximation of one.
If this movie hadn’t been advertised, you wouldn’t know any of that until you got a good chunk of the way into it though. During the opening few scenes, Gleeson’s character has been thrown into a fairly fantastic setting that he isn’t familiar with, and it isn’t completely clear to him or us why he’s there or what he’s supposed to be doing. There’s a good chunk of runtime, before Isaac’s character explains things, where we’re forced to sit in an uncertain situation and do our best to blindly explore it, just as much as the protagonist is. Is Gleeson’s character in danger? Is he about to embark on a magical and life-changing journey? It’s not clear, but what’s clear is that anything is possible with this setup, and thanks to that the film is instantly interesting.
Of course, given their talent, once Isaac and Gleeson begin discussing the particulars of their situation the movie is still able to maintain the momentum that the early mystery afforded it. They’re both great actors, so it’s consistently engaging to watch them share scenes together. Even more than that though, they’re able to develop a straight man and wild man dynamic that takes their interactions to a whole other level. Basically they’re doing a classed up version of vaudeville schtick, and you can tell they’re having a lot of fun with it. Gleeson is great at being nervous, tentative, and overly polite, and Isaac really gets to test his boundaries by letting his freak flag fly and playing his character as a complete eccentric. Isaac will probably get more attention for his performance because it’s much flashier, but what he’s doing wouldn’t work without Gleeson’s reactions to everything he’s putting out there. They’re both really great.
The other performance that’s integral to the film’s success is Vikander as the robotic AI, and she too is a standout. Even when dressed up in robot garb, she’s uncannily human in her reactions and the way that she emotes, but at the same time she’s able to add enough uncanny valley into the way that she moves and speaks that you can tell there’s something stiff and vaguely naive about her. It’s an impressive needle she’s able to thread. Aside from the specifics of what she does with this character, it’s also really clear that she’s got an unmistakably powerful star presence that’s impossible to ignore. This is only the second movie I’ve ever seen her in and her face is already burned into my brain. Give it a year or two and chances are pretty good that Vikander is going to be showing up in basically every movie getting made.
How’s all of the stuff about robotics and artificial intelligence and the connection that the development of it creates between humans and gods? Interesting enough. But it’s basically the same thematic stuff that every one of these robot movies tackles. The thing that puts Ex Machina ahead of the pack—besides its awesome acting and gorgeous production design—is the way that it’s able to harness the unnerving nature of human facsimiles to create tension and dread.
Without having to rely on hacky gimmicks like spooky music or lingering on the actors as they make ambiguously threatening faces, Garland is able to imbue his entire movie with a sense of menace and danger, and the subtly with which he’s able to create that mood allows the viewer to always question whether or not what they’re watching is even supposed to be scary. As your physical reaction to the film’s tension building gets more pronounced, you find yourself questioning whether you’re really supposed to be feeling that way at all, or whether it’s all in your head because you’ve been reading the movie wrong. Of course, this is a thriller, so you haven’t been reading things wrong. Insanity is going to start popping off eventually, and an ominous warning drops at just the perfect time to amp things up and keep you from worrying that all of this weirdness isn’t eventually going to go anywhere. The third act of Ex Machina gets so dangerous and so intense that suddenly it becomes clear that you’ve wandered from a rather high-minded and artful science fiction story into a full-on horror movie, and that’s awesome, but what’s really awesome is how perfectly paced the escalation of the danger is. This movie plays the audience like a fiddle right up until things have reached a boiling point, and then it delivers enough blood and loud noises and insanity to completely pay off all of the build and to send you home pleasantly disturbed.
Maybe the greatest of the many great things about Ex Machina is this way that it’s able to switch genres and tones several times, without ever feeling like it’s ineffective or unsure of what it wants to be. At times it feels like you’re watching some kind of arthouse drama, and at others it feels like you’re watching a piece of hard science fiction, but by the time the shit hits the fan in the third act, what you’re watching becomes a full on Frankenstein’s monster story that somehow also includes an element of titillation. By the end of the film, everyone residing in this house has become a monster of some sort, and somehow they’ve all managed to be dead sexy while doing so. In fact, if we’re being completely honest, the most impressive thing that Ex Machina does is convince you of just how close you are to being willing to have sex with a robot. Trust me, it’s closer than you think.
