This intellectually teasing, near-future drama stars Domhnall Gleeson, with Oscar Isaac as a reclusive AI genius and an eerily bewitching Alicia Vikander as the android Ava, programmed to test the boundaries of creation.
Stylish, elegant, tense, cerebral, satirical and creepy… Alicia Vikander’s bold performance will short your circuits.
Screened as part of NZIFF 2015
Ex Machina 2015
| Aug 13 | | ||
| Aug 14 | |
Novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (The Beach) makes a decisive directorial debut with this smart, sleekly designed and flawlessly performed psy-fi drama.
“Ava (Alicia Vikander) doesn’t mean to scare you. She only wants to get inside your head. The heroine of Alex Garland’s Ex Machina has sharp blue eyes, an even, inquisitive voice and skin so clear it seems to soften the air around it. She’s also a robot, pieced together by a reclusive genius in a house shrouded by mountains, and her thought processes are sparked by the terms millions of humans are keying into Blue Book, the world’s most popular internet search engine…
Ava’s creator, the alpha-male tech guru Nathan (Oscar Isaac), describes his eureka moment thusly: it was when he realised that Blue Book didn’t simply tell him what people all over the world were thinking, but how they were thinking too… Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) has won a staff lottery to visit Nathan at his isolated home-slash-HQ, a helicopter ride away, to bear witness to the company’s top-secret new product… The aim of the week-long visit is for Caleb to carry out a Turing Test: over the course of seven daily encounters with Ava, he has to get to know her and decide whether or not she can pass for a human being… This is bewitchingly smart science fiction of a type that’s all too rare. Its intelligence is anything but artificial.” — Robbie Collin, The Telegraph
“Shrewdly imagined and persuasively made, Ex Machina is a spooky piece of speculative fiction that’s completely plausible, capable of both thinking big thoughts and providing pulp thrills.” — Kenneth Turan, LA Times