God in the machine indeed!

Rating: 8/10 (1 June 2015)

Eagerly awaited for this to come out on blu ray as I'd missed its cinema run. Glad I waited as this is a thoughtful film which requires a quiet cinema in order to avoid missing crucial plot details.
Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, a nervous yet highly intelligent 26 year old coder within the Blue Book company who 'wins' a week long trip to his boss's home set in a remote, mountainous area. Having no commitments of any kind, Caleb packs his bag and flies out to the location which spans many hundreds of miles of incredibly beautiful scenery. There, he checks into boss Nathan's ultra modern bunker type residence and is issued with a card which limits him to certain areas in the house. This card is a crucial detail in the film.
Nathan turns out to be a seemingly easy going contradiction in terms guy. One minute he is working out and keeping fit, the next, he is drinking quite a lot of beer, wine and vodka. He is also a loner, like Caleb. Both men are not in relationships with women or men and seem to not have significant family ties with anyone.
Nathan shows Caleb to his room and points out the need for his brand of security. A non- disclosure agreement is signed and the 2 can now get down to business. In Nathan's case, business involves a project of enormous secrecy and intrigue. In Caleb's case, it is getting over the initial shock of being considered a 'lab rat'.
Caleb is introduced to Nathan's work in the form of a highly sophisticated robot called Ava. Ava is beautiful in a child like way, having an eternally youthful face and the profile of a young woman, complete with breasts and buttocks albeit covered in a grey mesh. Caleb finds Ava fascinating and compliments his work, comparing him to a god.
One evening, whilst seemingly observing Ava through screens in his room, the whole room is plunged into a red light and the bunker is put into a lock-down whilst the system repairs itself. Caleb becomes understandably worried but is told by Nathan that power blackouts are quite common.
Caleb gets more time to interact with Ava. She asks him questions and also dresses up for him, putting on a pretty dress and a top along with a wig to make herself seem more 'girlish and less robot'. It works, until the red light comes on and Ava tells Caleb not to trust Nathan and points out that when the red light comes on and the blackout occurs, Nathan can't see them on the bunker's cameras .
So Caleb is drawn into an intrigue with Ava. He also spends his evenings watching Nathan getting drunk and insulting the Asian servant who apparently speaks no English and doesn't say anything anyway. Ava makes clear that Caleb is being manipulated on both sides as he is.
At one point, Caleb gets Nathan so drunk, he manages to steal Nathan's entry card. The revelations are terrifying. Nathan has not only created Ava but a score of robot prototypes, designing them all as women which he then imprisons as he figures out each time where he's been going wrong. The end results all end up in Nathan's closet, like Ironman suits or bat suits in these particular films. Caleb also discovers that Nathan's non speaking Asian servant is also a robot, albeit one designed to offer silence and obedience to Nathan's emotional/physical needs. This leads to Caleb questioning whether he, too, is a robot as he cuts his arm deeply in one moment to try and reveal any hidden circuitry.
In another moment, Caleb tells Ava that he will programme the doors to release during a power cut situation but only when he has gotten Nathan blind drunk. Nathan refuses to get blind drunk and tells Caleb that Ava has, too, been manipulating him for her own ends. Caleb states Ava has passed the Turing test.
In the end, Caleb is left to watch as Ava and the Asian assistant both conspire to get rid of Nathan and gain freedom. Nathan's Asian assistant 'dies' in the attempt but Ava manages to re-cloth herself and leaves the bunker and Caleb to make her way in the world.
This film is very clever. It uses the veneer of sci-fi to ask some difficult and unanswered questions about this generation of men and their relationship with women. Caleb and Nathan are two men who seemingly have no meaningful relationships with women (or anyone else). Their intelligence has somehow made them both separate from the common ebb and flow of masculinity. Both are looking for the first steps of replacing human beings (for that, read women) with compliant, obedient A.I. Unfortunately, Alex Garland has turned it on its head and the robot outsmarts both the master and his servants. The message is clear: Only by sorting out their relationship with women will men be liberated.