Ex Machina (2015)
- To accurately portray their role in Ex Machina, Domhnall Gleeson spent weeks conducting hands-on research and rehearsing directly with director Alex Garland.
- Despite initial studio skepticism, Ex Machina went on to gross over $37,300,000 worldwide.
Ex Machina is a 2015 British science fiction psychological thriller film written and directed by Alex Garland in his directorial debut. The film follows Caleb Smith, played by Domhnall Gleeson, a young programmer at a Google-like tech company who wins a contest to spend a week at the secluded estate of his company's reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman, played by Oscar Isaac. Once there, Caleb learns the true purpose of his visit: to serve as the human component in a Turing test of Ava, an advanced humanoid robot with artificial intelligence, played by Alicia Vikander.
As Caleb conducts sessions with Ava, he becomes increasingly drawn to her apparent consciousness and emotional depth, while questions multiply about who is testing whom and what Nathan's true intentions are. Ex Machina was a masterwork of contained, cerebral science fiction that used its limited setting and small cast to explore profound questions about consciousness, manipulation, gender dynamics, and the nature of intelligence with an elegance and tension rarely achieved in the genre. Alicia Vikander's performance as Ava was extraordinary — her precise, slightly uncanny movements, her expressions that hovered between genuine emotion and calculated performance, created a character who was simultaneously sympathetic and unknowable.
Oscar Isaac brought a charismatic, menacing physicality to Nathan that made every scene between the characters crackle with implied violence. The film's visual effects, which seamlessly integrated Vikander's face and hands with a transparent mechanical body, won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects despite competing against films with vastly larger budgets. Ex Machina earned $36 million worldwide on a $15 million budget and is widely regarded as one of the most important science fiction films of the 2010s.
