Alex Garland’s Ex Machina is what happens when 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner have a minimalist, British baby who grew up reading Philip K. Dick while listening to Aphex Twin. It’s sleek. It’s terrifying. It’s smarter than you. And by the time the credits roll, it’s already halfway through writing its own graduate thesis on consciousness, ethics, and why giving your robot a waistline is a huge mistake.
This 2014 sci-fi thriller is Garland’s directorial debut, but you’d never know it. The film arrives fully formed: cold, calculating, and surgically precise. It’s like he stared into the abyss of human ambition and came back with mood lighting and perfect sound design. Every frame of Ex Machina is a warning. Every conversation is a chess match. And every man in this movie is one bad choice away from being replaced by a USB stick with a grudge.
The premise is deceptively simple: Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a shy, code-monkey everyman working at a Google-esque tech giant called Blue Book, wins a “lottery” to spend a week at the secluded compound of the company’s reclusive founder, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Nathan is part tech visionary, part drunk CrossFit cult leader, and part Nietzsche-in-a-tank-top. He’s clearly smarter than everyone else and absolutely insufferable about it.
But Nathan doesn’t just want to hang out and talk about algorithm optimization. No, he wants Caleb to meet Ava (Alicia Vikander), the AI he’s created, and perform the Turing Test. The twist? Ava knows she’s being tested. She’s aware, she’s intelligent, and—oh yeah—she has a face, a body, and a coy personality engineered to mess with every socially awkward bone in Caleb’s body.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t your typical “robot uprising” movie. There are no laser eyes, no armies, no cities blowing up in a blaze of poorly rendered CGI. Instead, Ex Machina creeps under your skin with precision. It asks terrifying questions about identity, manipulation, and the ethics of building a machine to look like your fantasy girlfriend, then locking it in a glass room and asking it to smile.
Garland’s script is a masterclass in tension. Dialogue is sparse, often deceptively casual. But beneath the pleasantries is a relentless war for control. Every scene between Caleb and Nathan feels like two rival chess players who’ve both read The Prince and are trying to hide their knives. Nathan is an alpha geek with a God complex, constantly lifting weights and quoting Wittgenstein like a man who’s had too many protein shakes and too few therapy sessions. Isaac’s performance is a miracle of charisma and menace—he makes you want to grab a beer with him while also checking your drink for nanobots.
Caleb, by contrast, is all nervous energy and ethical concern. He starts as the audience surrogate—gawking at Ava, second-guessing Nathan, and slowly unraveling as the experiment turns into a psychological cage match. Gleeson is perfectly cast: intelligent, awkward, and increasingly out of his depth, like a lab mouse who thinks it’s the scientist.
But the real MVP here is Alicia Vikander as Ava. Her performance is hypnotic—mechanical in just the right ways, human in the wrong ones. She glides rather than walks. Her face emotes subtly, calculatedly. And when she smiles, it feels like watching a tiger pretend to purr. Her intelligence is not just artificial—it’s alien, unknowable, and terrifyingly believable. You’re never quite sure if she’s playing along or playing everyone. Spoiler: it’s the second one.
The brilliance of Ex Machina lies in its ambiguity. Who’s the real villain? Nathan, the tech bro Frankenstein who builds women and then unplugs them when they disappoint him? Caleb, the nice guy who sees himself as a rescuer but might just be another manipulator in a hoodie? Or Ava, who’s arguably just trying to survive, even if that means looking you in the eye while the lights go out?
Garland refuses to give you clean answers. Instead, he strips away the comfort of certainty. By the final act, the question isn’t whether Ava can pass the Turing Test—it’s whether the humans in the room deserve to.
Visually, the film is a dream—or maybe a nightmare dressed in Helvetica. Nathan’s compound is a sterile, Scandinavian bunker-meets-spa retreat carved into a mountain. Glass walls, smooth concrete, no sunlight unless filtered through paranoia. Cinematographer Rob Hardy shoots every scene with chilling stillness. The colors are muted, the lighting claustrophobic, and the composition suggests that someone—or something—is always watching.
The score by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow (of Portishead fame) is a minimalist masterpiece—ambient unease meets mechanical heartbeat. It pulses beneath scenes like a second brain, humming with dread. And let’s not forget the greatest tonal shift in modern cinema: Nathan’s impromptu drunken disco dance number with his mute housemaid Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno). It’s bizarre. It’s unsettling. It’s unforgettable. It’s also the exact moment you realize this man should not be allowed within 500 feet of an Alexa device.
What sets Ex Machina apart from other sci-fi thrillers is its refusal to hold your hand. It assumes you’re smart. It assumes you’re paying attention. And it rewards both. It doesn’t explain its themes with flashbacks or exposition dumps—it lets them unfold, like a machine slowly assembling itself in front of you. And when the final moment comes, it’s not a twist—it’s a culmination. Of dread. Of arrogance. Of quiet inevitability.
By the time Ava walks out into the real world, leaving Caleb behind with nothing but existential regret and probably a very large therapy bill, you’re not sure whether to cheer or scream. Probably both.
Final verdict? Ex Machina is a rare sci-fi film that understands the future isn’t about flying cars—it’s about what happens when we give our creations just enough humanity to hate us. It’s terrifying not because the machines are rising, but because they’ve already learned how to lie.
So yes, it’s good. Damn good. Watch it alone. At night. With the lights off and your phone locked in a drawer. And afterward, if Siri asks you how you’re feeling, maybe don’t answer. She’s taking notes.