One of this year's best.

Rating: 10/10 (22 March 2015)

It's as if Alex Garland had found the key and unlocked the door that most filmmakers today are still trying to locate. EX MACHINA is both beautiful and scary, hitchcockian and I loved ever minute of it. From the production design to the visual effects, from the performances to the story, everything moves smoothly like a well-oiled machine.
Alex Garland is the scribe who gave us "28 Days Later," "Sunshine," "Dredd," and EX MACHINA marks his feature directorial debut which he also scripted, it's a high sci-fi concept about artificial intelligence and it tackles things that you haven't seen other movies about A.I.'s have tackled before and it's because they's mostly focus on what happens after the A.I. is up and running or they'd focus on teaching the A.I. like you would a little kid, whereas EX MACHINA covers what happens before that, it wrestles with the psychology, the conscience and the sexuality of it all, that big million-dollar question of whether a machine can feel and decide like we humans do.
I actually enjoyed Alex Garland-scripted 2007 sci-fi, "Sunshine" but the third act turned into a mess that was all over the place, and 2010's "Never Let Me Go" adaptation wasn't perfect either, thankfully it seems that he has since honed his sci-fi storytelling skills. But you can't really analyze this film without discussing the plot first, so here it is, without any spoiler. Domhnall Gleeson plays a programmer named Caleb Smith who works at an internet search engine company and he wins a competition to spend a week at the private mountain estate owned by the company's CEO, Nathan Bateman, played by Oscar Isaac. But Caleb learns that Nathan actually chose him to be the human component in a Turing test on Nathan's artificial intelligence experiment named Ava. She's breathtaking but also she holds a different version of truth.
One of the things fascinating about EX MACHINA is the way Garland dissects it into sessions in which Nathan would observe Caleb interact with Ava but they're separated by a glass. There would be frequent power outage and Ava would use those opportunities to tell Caleb to not trust Nathan. OK, if I say more, I'm afraid I might spoil stuff for you so let me just break it down right here, OK, EX MACHINA is pretty much a mind game, all the time you think you know who's playing who, until the table is turned and you'll see who's actually playing who at the end. Everything is a test. It's a smartly conceived thriller that takes its time.
The debates between Caleb and Nathan put you in some kind of tug of war because one character would say something and you'd side with him and the other would say something that makes more sense and you'd switch side, just like that. Oscar Isaac's character, Nathan, seems to have an answer for everything, anytime Caleb presents a counter argument, Nathan gets it covered and he'd sell his point of view convincingly, you can't help but agree even though there's a part of you that questions his motif. Domhnall and Oscar are so good at these moments, it's that game of wit, between admiration and intellect, Oscar is extremely charismatic in his approach, Caleb is persistent and Alicia Vikander is a work of art as Ava, simply stunning.
The setting is also breathtaking, the environment, this incredible looking smart house, it really makes Tom Cruise's space tower in Oblivion looks cheap. Everything about EX MACHINA looks polished and crisp, one cannot resist wanting to be there, to live there until, of course, the nightmare sinks in. Cinema has always been fascinated with questions of whether or not artificial intelligence could someday take over and eliminate us, well, EX MACHINA gives us a possible scenario leading up to that day when all hell ultimately breaks loose.