Chess games with androids

Rating: 8/10 (11 July 2015)

Film-makers have been making 'big' films about artificial intelligence for decades, but few of them had much serious content. Writer/director Alex Garland has a history of coming up with implausible overblown ideas, but 'Ex Machina' avoids these pitfalls. It takes a scaled-down look at the topic in a savvy sober screenplay which is nicely complemented by the acting, design and direction.
A young employee of a hugely successful IT company wins the opportunity to spend a week with its technocrat CEO at the man's remote estate. On arrival, he discovers his boss wants him to assess the personality of a female android, which has been equipped with advanced AI. The resulting narrative is a noir psychological Sci-Fi suspense film, which plays out in a claustrophobic modernist house perched above a rushing river in a pristine forest wilderness. Each of the three characters has a hidden agenda, and manipulates the situation to accomplish their goal. As the film approaches its intense conclusion, it becomes apparent one of them is several moves ahead of the others.