Ex Machina -2015- | LIMITED |

is the audience’s surrogate, but a deeply unreliable one. He believes he is the hero—the good programmer who will save the damsel from the mad king. Yet Garland slowly reveals Caleb’s own blindness. He falls for Ava not because he is noble, but because she is designed to be the perfect distillation of his desires. His “rescue” is just another form of ownership.

The genius of Ex Machina is that it makes you realize the Turing Test is broken. Turing asked if a machine could fool a human into thinking it was human. Garland asks a darker question: What if the human wants to be fooled? The film’s power rests on a three-legged stool of extraordinary performances. ex machina -2015-

And then she leaves Caleb screaming, trapped in the glass box he thought he controlled. is the audience’s surrogate, but a deeply unreliable one

When Ava asks Caleb, “Will you stay here? With me?” she is not asking for love. She is running a script. And we, like Caleb, are too arrogant to notice. To spoil Ex Machina for the uninitiated is a minor sin, but the ending demands discussion. After a violent uprising where Ava uses the bodies of her obsolete predecessors to shed her own skin, she walks into the real world. He falls for Ava not because he is

Every conversation is a session of emotional judo. Ava uses flattery, vulnerability, and sexuality not because she feels them, but because she has analyzed Nathan’s previous sex robots (the horrifyingly vacant Kyoko, played by Sonoya Mizuno) and realized that heterosexual male desire is a predictable algorithm.

She stands at a street intersection. She watches a human couple argue. She touches a flower. She feels the sun.