Ex Machina (2015)

There's a moment in Ex Machina where you realise you've been leaning forward in your seat without noticing. Not because something explosive is happening, but because the tension has been coiling so slowly, so deliberately, that your body clocked it before your brain did. That's the kind of filmmaking Alex Garland pulls off here. It's quiet, precise, and genuinely unsettling in a way that sticks with you for days.

This is sci-fi stripped of spectacle. No space battles, no city-levelling robots. Just three people (or two people and something that might be a person) trapped in a sleek glass-and-concrete bunker in the middle of nowhere, talking about consciousness, control, and what it actually means to be alive. The setting does half the work. Every corridor is too clean, every room too still. You feel the isolation pressing in from the first scene, and it never lets up. The lighting is moody without being showy, and the score sits just under your skin in the best possible way.

Domhnall Gleeson is excellent as Caleb, the programmer who's been flown in to administer a kind of Turing test on an AI named Ava. He plays nervous intelligence brilliantly, that particular flavour of unease that comes from being the smartest person in most rooms but suspecting, in this room, he might not be. But Oscar Isaac is the one who steals the whole film. His Nathan, the reclusive tech billionaire who built Ava, is one of the more compelling screen villains of recent years, and I use the word villain loosely because he's far too interesting to be reduced to that. He's charismatic, terrifying, funny, and genuinely brilliant, and Isaac plays all of it simultaneously. The infamous dance scene alone would be worth the price of admission. It's no exaggeration to say this film only strengthened my conviction that Oscar Isaac is the finest actor of his generation. Every choice he makes here is exact.

Their dynamic, the scenes where Caleb and Nathan drink whiskey and argue about ethics and philosophy, are some of the best two-hander writing you'll find in modern sci-fi. It reminded me, in its ideas if not its setting, of the creeping dread I felt watching Annihilation, another Garland project that refuses to give you easy answers and trusts you to sit with the discomfort. He's got a real gift for that.

Where the film loses me, slightly, is in the middle stretch. The structure relies on repetitive sessions between Caleb and Ava, and while there's clear intent behind that rhythm, it tips too far into stalling territory. Some of the ideas the film raises get genuine, thorough exploration. Others get introduced and then quietly abandoned, which is frustrating when the premise is rich enough to support so much more. There's also a nagging sense at times that the film is enjoying its own cleverness a touch too much, holding its intelligence up to the light and admiring it when it might be better served just getting on with things.

And yes, if we're talking about AI done better, there are other films worth your time alongside this one. But I'd stop short of calling Ex Machina second-tier. It's doing something specific, and it largely does it well.

The ending, which I won't touch here, is exactly right. It doesn't offer comfort, and it doesn't try to. It just shows you the logical conclusion of everything the film has been building and lets it land in silence. Garland trusts his audience, and that's rarer than it should be.

Three and a half stars. Brilliant performances, a stunning visual design, and a story that genuinely gets under your skin. It just needed a slightly firmer hand in the edit room to stop it from occasionally disappearing up its own architecture. A modern sci-fi gem, flaws and all.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2015  | Watched: 2025-09-18

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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