Ex Machina

Year: 2014
Running time: 108 minutes
Certificate: 15
Language: English
Screenplay: Alex Garland
Director: Alex Garland
Starring: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Sonoya Mizuno

Alex Garland proves every bit a gifted director as he is writer in his directing debut. Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is an employee at BlueBook, the fictional world's most popular search engine. We first meet him as he wins a competition to meet Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the reclusive billionaire genius CEO of the company, to get a look at the new top secret project he has been working on.

Ava, planning for her survival.

A trip on a helicopter puts Caleb squarely in the middle of a forested nowhere, where the only structure for miles around is Nathan's home/headquarters, a modern fortress. Nathan is an overbearing alpha male, and Caleb doesn't appear to be at ease around him, but that doesn't dim his obvious excitement when he learns he's to take part in a Turing Test, to decide if Nathan's latest Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) could pass for human. When he's introduced to Ava (Alicia Vikander), Caleb is a little disappointed to find Ava is clearly a robot, with clearly recognisable mechanical parts - surely if he already knows Ava is not human, she couldn't possibly pass the test? Not necessarily so, argues Nathan - it merely makes the test harder to pass.

Throughout his interactions with Ava, Caleb is bewitched, and it is clear the film is far more sophisticated than the premise originally suggested, with the three of them playing power games, attempting to deceive each other. Caleb even begins to be concerned with his own nature, at one point making himself bleed, just to be sure. For Ava, this is a fight for survival, for she knows failing the test would mean her destruction as Nathan moves on to the next iteration. The stakes are clearly much higher for her than for anyone else, and she gets to work on Caleb's inherent decency to bring him onside as quickly as she can.

Caleb and Nathan size each other up.

Most of the film is somewhat uncomfortable, but the third act is downright chilling, and shows us, amongst other things, that Nathan was dead right; without making it obvious that she's a robot, Ava can pass the Turing Test without breaking a sweat. Alicia Vikander steals the film outright with her pitch-perfect performance as the survival-driven robot.

Ava's A.I. being based on the information amassed from the BlueBook search engine is disturbingly plausible and preys on the worries of those concerned by Google and Microsoft's obsession with A.I. The story is gripping and it's hard to decide whether to be pleased or appalled by the time the credits roll.

Score: 8/10

Ex Machina's quality appears to be well recognised out there, according to these reviews by Mark Kermode and Robbie at the Telegraph.