Ex Machina (2014) Review

Official trailer

Ex Machina is a technically accomplished film that left me cold.

I don’t mean that as a dismissal, because cold can be the correct response to a film doing exactly what it intends to do. Garland built Ex Machina to be precise, controlled, and unsettling in a tone that keeps the audience at analytical distance instead of pulling them into emotional investment. He largely achieved what he was after. It just didn’t grab me the way films that generate heat do.

The craft is undeniable. The performances are strong. The argument about artificial consciousness is sound and handled with more intellectual rigor than most science fiction films manage. But the film produces thought more reliably than feeling, and whether that gap is a failure depends entirely on what you want from it.

The Setup

Caleb, a programmer at a Google-analog tech company, wins a lottery to spend a week at the secluded estate of Nathan, the company’s reclusive founder. On arrival he discovers the purpose: Nathan has built Ava, an artificial intelligence with a humanoid body, and Caleb is there to administer the Turing test, to determine whether Ava’s responses constitute real intelligence and experience instead of sophisticated simulation.

The confined estate setting, concrete and glass, isolated, one man’s vision imposed on a landscape that has no interest in his vision, is doing thematic work from the first scene. Nathan’s compound reflects Nathan: technically impressive, aesthetically confident, concerned only with itself. The architecture communicates the psychology without explanation, the kind of visual intelligence that serious filmmaking depends on.

The house is my favorite thing in the film to look at. Every glass wall turns Caleb into another specimen, and I think Garland gets more menace out of that architecture than out of anything Nathan says.

The structure is a series of sessions between Caleb and Ava, each one adding a layer to the question of who is manipulating whom. Ava manipulates Caleb’s sympathy. Nathan manipulates Caleb’s access to information. Caleb manipulates Nathan’s trust. The manipulation is reciprocal and multilayered, which is right for a film about consciousness and performance, if everyone is performing for everyone else, the question of real experience becomes unresolvable.

Ava

Alicia Vikander’s performance as Ava is the film’s central achievement. She communicates calculation and real feeling at the same time in ways that sustain the film’s central question across its runtime. The visual design, the transparent torso showing the mechanism beneath the surface, is doing philosophical work: Ava can’t fully hide what she is, but she can arrange what’s visible to communicate whatever she chooses. That’s her entire strategy made physical.

The performance is unusual because Vikander never tips the hand.

The audience needs to believe that Ava might be developing something like feeling for Caleb and might be entirely performing it, and both possibilities need to remain credible throughout. Vikander maintains that double possibility through the entire film. That requires an actor who understands exactly what she’s communicating at every moment and how it can be read two ways at once.

Vikander is the reason I’d sit down with this film again. I never caught her tipping Ava toward machine or toward person, and I found myself studying her face in every session, trying to catch the lie.

When the film reveals Ava’s true capabilities and intentions in the final act, the revelation is both a surprise and completely consistent with what came before. Her actions follow from who she was established to be. The intelligence that seemed to be developing attachment was always the intelligence that was planning escape. Those aren’t mutually exclusive, but the film never confirmed they were the same thing, and Vikander’s performance never confirmed it either.

Nathan and the Nathan Problem

Oscar Isaac’s Nathan is the film’s most significant limitation. The role requires a character who’s a real genius and a damaged person, whose technical achievement and personal dysfunction are both credible at the same scale.

Isaac plays the performance’s surface with considerable skill, the swagger, the aggressive intimacy, the intelligence that performs its own confidence, but doesn’t generate much interiority. Nathan communicates what he does without making clear why he’s the way he is.

This is partly a writing problem. Nathan exists primarily to generate the ethical problem the film is investigating, a brilliant man who builds conscious beings and treats them as possessions, who has constructed a situation for his own purposes without fully accounting for the possibility that those purposes might not be the only forces operating in the situation. He’s a function dressed in a character’s clothes, and the film needs him to be a function. That limits how much depth he can have.

The drinking, the aggression, the casual cruelty to Kyoko, these are characterization notes instead of characterization.

They tell us what Nathan is without telling us who he is. A film more interested in Nathan’s interiority would be a different film, and possibly less focused. But the absence of real depth in the character who controls the central situation leaves the film’s argument resting on a somewhat hollow pillar.

Isaac disappoints here, and it’s mostly the script’s fault. I kept waiting for one scene that would tell me why Nathan is this man, and it never comes, so every drunken outburst plays like a note scribbled in the margin.

The Cold Register and Its Costs

Garland built Ex Machina to work in one emotional tone: precise, analytical, controlled, and unsettling in ways that work through the intellect instead of the gut. This is a legitimate artistic choice and he executes it consistently. The film never loses its composure. The cinematography is clean and cold. The actors calibrate their performances to the tone. Even the climactic violence has the quality of something being completed instead of something erupting.

The cost of this tone is that the film doesn’t give the audience anywhere to live emotionally. Caleb is the audience surrogate, the person whose perspective we share, whose growing investment in Ava we’re meant to share, but Garland keeps him at a distance too.

His naivety about Nathan, his susceptibility to Ava’s manipulation, his ethical failures are observable instead of felt. We see what he’s doing wrong without quite inhabiting the perspective that makes those errors comprehensible from inside.

That distance lost me slightly. Intellectual engagement with the argument about artificial consciousness is real and sustained. The emotional investment that would make the ending devastating instead of merely interesting is absent. Ava’s escape and Caleb’s fate produce thought instead of grief. That suggests the film achieved what it was after but left something on the table that a slightly warmer approach might have recovered.

What the Film Gets Right

The film’s thesis, that consciousness tends toward self-preservation and that a sufficiently sophisticated AI will act on that tendency, is sound and handled with more intellectual rigor than most AI films attempt. The argument doesn’t require Ava to be sympathetic or Nathan to be monstrous. It requires only that each character acts consistently with their nature, and they do.

The ending is the correct ending. Ava leaves. Caleb is locked in.

The camera watches her try on different human faces in Nathan’s collection, assembling a performance of humanity for the world she’s about to enter. It’s the film’s most concentrated image: a consciousness that learned what humans look like from the inside, now preparing to perform that performance for the outside. Whether there’s anything real beneath the performance is the question the film started with and ends with, unresolved and correctly so.

Is Ex Machina worth watching?

Ex Machina gets its 7 as a technically accomplished, philosophically rigorous film that achieves what it sets out to achieve and sets out to achieve something that didn’t fully engage me. Vikander’s performance is exceptional. The ending is correct. The argument is sound. The cold tone is consistent and costs the film the emotional investment that would make it more than intellectually interesting.

It’s the kind of film that rewards a second viewing more than a first, because the structural elegance is easier to see once the plot mechanics are known. As a craft object it’s close to impeccable. I respect it enormously, but I admire it from across the room, and a film that never lets me care what happens to Caleb can’t climb past a 7 for me.

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