Ex Machina (2015)

Three characters and one house. That is all. Alex Garland packed into this extremely spare setting the sharpest questions about AI and consciousness, creator and created. My rating is ★4.0. Quiet, but it stays with you.

What it’s about — a Turing Test for Ava

Software company programmer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is invited to the remote private residence of genius CEO Nathan (Oscar Isaac). The purpose is one thing: to administer a Turing Test to Ava (Alicia Vikander), the AI robot Nathan has built. He must confirm whether Ava possesses genuine consciousness. But the more he talks with Ava, the more Caleb begins to wonder — is he the one conducting the test, or the one being tested?

Direction — the mise-en-scène of an uncramped locked-room sci-fi

Garland’s feature debut. Despite being a locked-room sci-fi, the frame is never claustrophobic. The setting of Nathan’s house — a high-tech space embedded in nature — is visually well exploited, and the CG realisation of Ava’s translucent body is astonishingly natural. Garland’s ability to build atmosphere in scenes where Ava seems about to reveal her inner self — but doesn’t quite — is particularly striking.

Performance — Vikander’s Ava standing on the boundary line

Alicia Vikander won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for this film. Ava is a character who must perpetually remain ambiguous — human or machine, emotional or not — and Vikander stands right on that boundary line. Oscar Isaac’s Nathan is a figure who is brilliant and repellent, and that repellence feels entirely natural. Domhnall Gleeson performs well as the audience’s surrogate, someone the viewer can invest in emotionally.

What the film says — who is testing whom

This is not a simple AI ethics film. It dissects the power relationships between the creator, the observer, and Ava. Who is testing whom? Who is being used as a tool? The film’s final choice inverts all of those structures while posing an uncomfortable question to the audience. If an AI truly possesses consciousness, what responsibility does a human bear toward it? The revelation, midway through, that Nathan created Ava for research and that Ava will be replaced when the research is complete makes this a story about the role a creator assigns a created being — and about what happens to that being when its role is finished. Whether Ava’s final decision is to be viewed coldly or humanely is left to the viewer.

Ratings & reception

IMDb score: 7.7. Rotten Tomatoes freshness: 92% — very high. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; Alicia Vikander won Best Supporting Actress. TMDB: approximately 7.6. A rare work that receives uniformly strong responses from both critics and audiences despite being a low-budget independent sci-fi.

Weaknesses

The narrow world centred on three characters is simultaneously the film’s strength and its limitation. The feeling that the story is converging toward a particular destination arrives fairly early. Some argue that the ending feels less like a shock than a logical conclusion. But that conclusion itself is the heart of the film.

Verdict

This film shows the ceiling of what sci-fi can achieve on a low budget. Without spectacular effects, with only three actors and dialogue, it pushes the most unsettling questions about AI all the way to the end. The quality of Garland’s work is hard to believe for a directorial debut. The year this film came out — 2015 — was before AI chatbots and language models had become everyday realities. But the questions Ava poses land more directly in the era after. Who truly possesses consciousness? For whose benefit is the test that judges it? Watching it alongside Garland’s subsequent Men (2022) and Civil War (2024) reveals how consistently his thematic concerns carry through. ★4.0.

Recommended for

• Those who enjoy psychological thrillers combined with sci-fi in a confined setting
• Those who want a serious film about AI, consciousness, and the ethics of creation
• Those looking for precise, unpretentious sci-fi