Ever since Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, female androids – or gynoids, to use the correct term – have been presented in cinematic science-fiction as a means of exploring man’s conflicted relationship with female sexuality. Where Lang’s 1927 opus dissected the impact of male fears on a religious and social level, Alex Garland’s Ex Machina updates the story to a modern age where the fight for control over women’s bodies has gone digital. The unsettling atmosphere which builds from the first meeting between Domhnall Gleeson’s jittery tech nerd Caleb and the robotic Ava, constructed by Oscar Isaac’s unstable Steve Jobs-alike Nathan, is as much down to the imbalance in control that the two men exert over Ava’s existence as Garland’s taut control of pace and tone.
Caleb is brought in by the reclusive Nathan to administer the Turing Test to Ava. However, since Caleb is aware of Ava being an AI from the start, Nathan posits that the real success will be if Caleb starts to regard her as a real person irrespective of that foreknowledge. Much of the drama unfolds through a series of conversations where Caleb increasingly feels as though it is he who is being tested, caught in the middle of a battle of wits between Nathan and his creation.
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Ex Machina
Director: Alex Garland
Rating: R
Release Date: January 21, 2015 (UK)
As an effective three-hander – one other character features semi-regularly, but remains silent – the movie hinges on the performance of its leads to make the conversations as engaging as they need to be to sustain the drama. Of the three, it’s Alicia Vikander’s Ava who steals the show. It’s hardly the first time we’ve seen this kind of performance in playing an AI – wide-eyed inquisitiveness, slightly inhuman movement, innocent demeanour – but Vikander ever so gently uses the body politics of the piece against its audience, using her character’s awareness of her enforced passivity to inflect sadness and fear even while not playing them directly.
Ava’s relationship with Caleb takes place entirely on either side of a glass screen and Vikander, with microscopic subtlety, evokes a sex worker talking to her client through a webcam, expressing desires and affections that can never quite be alluring enough to obscure the artifice of the performance. When she chooses to show Caleb what she would wear for him on a date, affecting a wig and a dress to conceal her transparent robotics, the scene carries a lingering sense of sadness that is reinforced with the sight later on of her undressing again, alone in the dark. Caleb later challenges Nathan over whether Ava was programmed to flirt with him, showing himself unable to distinguish between his outward anger at feeling manipulated and his inner frustration at being unable to indulge his fantasy that the object on the other side of the screen could be capable of sincere human intimacy. A late reveal about the parameters Nathan used in designing Ava only increases the underlying ugliness of the metaphor.
Oscar Isaac certainly gives Vikander a good run for her money. His Nathan is fearsome and mercurial, wracked by a genius-level intellect at once fuelling a self-image of a man on the verge of crossing the threshold into divinity, while stoking a barely suppressed paranoia about being destroyed by his creations, an internal psychological conflict he attempts to control through drink and violent exercise. Ava is his parallel: calm and controlled, intellectually curious but welcoming and engaging towards Caleb in lieu of Nathan’s domineering idea of friendship. Domhnall Gleeson too is as captivating a screen presence as ever, hiding a calculating cunning behind Caleb’s nebbish exterior.
Beyond its characters, the movie takes place exclusively in a single location, Nathan’s uber-modern hideaway in the stunning Norwegian wilderness. Garland slowly transforms the idyllic locale into an automated prison, contrasting the natural but sombre light of the house’s upper levels, where the boys eat and play with nature all around them, if once again behind protective screens, with the windowless lower floors, where Nathan’s research takes place under the sterile, unwavering glow of man-made light. The only misstep is the suffocating red lighting which accompanies the system-wide shutdowns occasionally forcing the house to reboot itself, a rather too obvious choice for a rather too obvious motif for the creator’s inability to fully understand and control his creation. That said, Garland deploys the same lighting trick to enormously creepy effect during a dance scene set to Get Down Saturday Night, more effectively playing into Caleb’s sense of being overwhelmed by his feelings of totally losing control of himself to Nathan’s manipulations.
Despite Garland reaching the director’s chair following a celebrated career as a novelist and screenwriter, his command of storytelling through visual language and the performances of his actors surprisingly proves more effective than his on-the-page plotting, which while commendably low-key and never losing sight of its subject matter, is a little predictable in its twists and occasionally blunt in its dialogue exchanges. There is never any doubt that Garland knows his audience is questioning everything shown and told to them, frequently doubling back on itself to maintain the same pervasive uncertainty which dogs Caleb throughout. Even with all the twists and turns, however, it’s disappointing when more than once the obvious first guess turns out to be correct.
These are, however, minor quibbles in what proves something of a sister piece to Spike Jonze’s Her. Where Jonze’s movie played up the sadness of a time when many of humanity’s most committed and honest relationships are to their machines and devices, Garland is more outwardly confrontational in condemning technology’s role in reducing others, particularly women, to nothing more than an image on a screen to be observed, shared and manipulated at the user’s whim. It makes a compelling case for the difference between attraction and objectification, with one a means of connection and the other a method of control. When Caleb asks Nathan why Ava was given sexuality at all, Nathan responds with what seems a considered response to humankind’s compulsion to act and interact, before sneeringly pulling an about-turn by suggesting that what Caleb wants to know is whether or not he can fuck her, with the answer being yes. The worrying thing is that for all the philosophical grace of the first answer, one suspects that Nathan is correct in assuming the second is what Caleb really wanted to hear.