After writing the likes of 28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go and Dredd, screenwriter and novelist Alex Garland has stepped up to the director’s chair with Ex Machina, a devilishly smart and gripping sci-fi exploration of our relationship with technology and the worrying truth that our search engines know us better than anyone else.
The film focuses on Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a promising young programmer at fictional search engine giant Blue Book. Caleb wins a prize draw to spend a week at the remote mountainside home of Blue Book’s reclusive CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac) and work on the company’s latest top secret invention.
From the moment they meet, things are a little off between Caleb and Nathan. Though he insists the younger man relax and treat him as a buddy rather than a boss, Nathan is far more assertive than the timid, awe-struck Caleb and that comes across in every interaction between the two. With a bushy beard and closely shaven head, Nathan is a menacing and unpredictable genius, prone to heavy drinking every night before pummelling a punching bag and detoxing in the morning. It’s a stark contrast to Caleb’s slight frame and nervous demeanour.
Nathan reveals that his latest creation is a supremely sophisticated robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander) and that Caleb’s task is to run the ‘Turing test’ on her to determine whether she can think and feel like a human being. As played by Vikander, a former ballerina and accomplished actress in the likes of A Royal Affair and most recently Testament of Youth, Ava is a sleek and beautiful creature that moves with eerie precision but displays so much intelligence, emotion and vulnerability that Caleb is very easily won over. Picking up on every reaction and micro-gesture, it’s as if Ava knows Caleb almost instantly and might even be developing romantic feelings for him.
With only three characters and essentially one set, Garland’s chamber-piece is a tight, claustrophobic affair that bristles with tension. Set almost exclusively in Nathan’s home – a slick and clinical collection of cavernous hallways and reflective surfaces – there is nowhere for Caleb to get away from Nathan, especially with the constant feeling that he’s being watched on one of the many surveillance cameras set up around the building.
Though Garland’s film is a serious and intelligent one, he isn’t afraid to pierce the tension every now and then with some surreal humour. One of the film’s standout sequences is a bizarre dance scene where a drunk Nathan performs an impressively choreographed jig to Get Down Saturday Night with his live-in Japanese servant Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno) that leaves Caleb dumbstruck.
Although the film occasionally feels like it’s treading water on the way to its finale, Ex Machina is an assured and ambitious directorial debut for Garland, one which presents big ideas via a tense, thrilling and steamy sci-fi parable with a revelatory performance by Vikander at its core.
