The desires for friendship, love, sex, and trust are at the heart of Ex-Machina even more so than the idea of artificial intelligence. It is the simplest film on this list taking place between three characters mostly in a handful of contained rooms. It is conversational suspense based on the psychology of trust.
More than any other film in this series Ex-Machina attempts to address the human/robot divide head on. The authenticity of machine-to-human interaction is its central plot element, couched in terms of sexual attraction and gender norms. The allure of male friendship is pitted against the interaction of men with creatures they don’t comprehend like women and machines.
A low level programmer at a software development firm on the level of Google or Microsoft wins a week with the company’s brilliant and reclusive founder in his legendary hideaway. The young man, named Caleb arrives and soon learns he is meant as a test subject for the boss’s new project, an artificially intelligent robot named Ava. The boss is named Nathan and is played by Oscar Isaacs as charming but pathologically self-possessed. He tries to establish a friendship with his guest.
Nathan slowly lets Caleb in on the nature of his presence there. Nathan never leaves either his robot or his guest unobserved yet he also seems genuinely interested in having the other young man’s trust and regard. For his part Caleb, played by Domhnall Gleeson, is appropriately awed but he never really loses his suspicion of his host.
The lure of a fraternal relationship with his boss immediately pales when he meets the alluring Ava. She is shaped and engineered as a woman and appears to feel and think like one as well. As with Under the Skin we are presented with the sexual unknown blurring into a technological uncertainty until they are almost interchangeable.
The main conflict arises when there is a power outage and, unobserved, Ava tells Caleb he is in danger. Whom should he trust, his ultra controlling boss who is human and a man like himself, someone whose motivations he at least understands, or the preternaturally attractive Ava whose motivations, as a machine and/or woman, are either entirely pure or entirely inscrutable?
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