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Review: In ‘Ex Machina,’ a Mogul Fashions the Droid of His Dreams

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Movie Review: ‘Ex Machina’

The times critic manohla dargis reviews “ex machina.”.

By Manohla Dargis

April 9, 2015

The perfect 21st-century female looks like a million bucks though costs a great deal more. In “Ex Machina,” Alex Garland’s slyly spooky futuristic shocker about old and new desires, the female in question is a robot called Ava , a name suggestive of both Adam and Eve. Ava has a serene humanoid face and the expressive hands and feet of a dancer, but also the transparent figure of a visible woman anatomy model. Beautiful and smart, sleek and stacked, Ava is at once decidedly unsettling and safely under lock and key, which makes her an ideal posthuman female.

“Ex Machina” is itself a smart, sleek movie about men and the machines they make, but it’s also about men and the women they dream up. That makes it a creation story, except instead of God repurposing a rib, the story here involves a Supreme Being who has built an A.I., using a fortune he’s made from a search engine called Blue Book. Mr. Garland, who wrote and directed, isn’t afraid of throwing around big names or heavy ideas, and he has pointedly named the search engine after Ludwig Wittgenstein’s 1930s “ Blue Book .” The trouble with thinking machines, Wittgenstein writes, isn’t that we don’t know yet if they can do the job, but “that the sentence ‘a machine thinks (perceives, wishes)’ seems somehow nonsensical.” And it seems so because such a machine is not (yet) known to us.

“Ex Machina” skips right over that little problem and, like all good science fiction, asserts that the apparently implausible (thinking machines) is absolutely here and now. It makes the imaginative leap, as does Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a software grunt who’s won a visit with his employer, the reclusive Blue Book mogul, Nathan (a terrific Oscar Isaac). Shortly after the movie opens, Caleb is being helicoptered to Nathan’s remote compound, a modernist retreat that’s part Zen palace, part patrician man cave, with verdant views, smart-house technology and one curiously mute female employee, a zomboid beauty named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno). This isn’t a house, Nathan explains while giving a tour; it’s a research facility in which he’s been working on an artificial intelligence project.

That would be Ava, a conceptual knockout played by the sensational young actress Alicia Vikander. Intricately rendered from her peekaboo belly to the mesh skin that covers much of her visibly artificial parts, Ava looks at once familiar and new, distinctly human and thoroughly machined, evoking by turns the robot in “Metropolis” and a parade of puppet and android vixens. With computer-generated imagery obscuring much of her body, Ms. Vikander builds her controlled performance incrementally, at times geometrically, with angled gestures, head tilts and precision steps. As Ava begins to expresses herself more, making eyes at the exit, Ms. Vikander, who studied ballet, may also remind you of that dancing doll Coppélia, if by way of a “Blade Runner” replicant.

Clip: ‘Ex Machina’

In this scene from alex garland’s film, caleb (domhnall gleeson) meets ava (alicia vikander) for the first time..

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Ex Machina Reviews

Ex Machina is one of the more brilliant artificial intelligence movies I've seen in quite some time.

Full Review | Aug 2, 2024

I’ve seen Ex Machina four times now, and every time it felt like a completely different movie. Alex Garland has created a new favorite of mine in the sci-fi genre...

Alex Garland’s cerebral sci-fi feels a lot like an Asimov novel—ironic, considering the movie actively defies Asimov’s own rules of robotics.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Jul 9, 2024

...the brilliance of the film is the way we become Garland’s Turing Test subjects.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Apr 5, 2024

“Ex Machina” works as a study of what it means to be conscious/human...I’m convinced more than ever that we are in the midst of a British New Wave in science fiction cinema.

Full Review | Jan 3, 2024

A commanding first directorial effort from Alex Garland, Ex Machina is the product of a perfectly-tuned collaborative endeavor, much like the mind of its artificial centerpiece.

Full Review | Aug 3, 2023

Presenting itself in heavily gendered terms, this sci-fi makes Nathan’s modernist bunker a prison-house of abusive, objectifying patriarchy from which Ava is bent on escaping.

Full Review | Jun 25, 2023

The tense, thoughtful sci-fi set in a remote cutting-edge cabin raises big questions and upgraded Alicia Vikander to even greater star status.

Full Review | Apr 20, 2023

All the doubts we've harbored through the film hit us like a hammer at the end, leaving us chilled. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Apr 5, 2023

... a science fiction film of ideas rather than visual spectacle.

Full Review | Aug 19, 2022

Ex Machina" has much more good than bad and much more surprise than contrivance when it comes to traversing the mine field that can be the science fiction topic of artificial intelligence, especially with a potentially damning title like that.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 14, 2022

By considering such ideas in an enclosed environment with so few characters, Garland has made Ex Machina an intense, engaging film that plays with the viewer's head and, as the best films often do, demands an exceptional degree of time to process.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 21, 2022

A fascinating sci-fi study of A.I. with incredible performances all around.

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Nov 20, 2021

Ex Machina is a smart, literate and occasionally quite brilliant film, which will upend a few of your expectations for where this story will end and how it will get there.

Full Review | Oct 29, 2021

Alex Garland's directorial debut is an artificial intelligence film that asks the right questions...

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | May 18, 2021

It's uncomfortable to consider that Ava might in fact be the heroine of this movie, but it's hard for me to find sympathy for men who only see her as an object to be abused or pitied.

Full Review | Mar 19, 2021

A high tech thriller that by and large ignores the tech to get down to the nitty gritty.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 3, 2021

I enjoyed watching the small cast of characters conspire with and against one another within the confines of a chillingly beautiful and remote techno-bunker.

Full Review | Jan 27, 2021

Ex Machina does much more than simply put the audience on edge, although it sustains that feeling expertly.

Full Review | Jan 20, 2021

A beguiling sci-fi thriller asks the audience to decide who's being tested, the AI or the human. There's plenty of twists and turns in this sensational isolated quest for survival.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/4 | Dec 16, 2020

Entertainment
<I>Ex Machina</i>: Can Two Wily Men Outsmart a Gorgeous Robot?

Ex Machina : Can Two Wily Men Outsmart a Gorgeous Robot?

Correction appended: April 10, 2015

After Eve: Ava. “She” is an advanced species of robot in female form, her flawless face encased in a Plexiglas skull, her arms and legs an efficient tangle of wires . Her creator, the Internet genius-entrepreneur Nathan (Oscar Isaac), has invited Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), one of his bright employees, to submit Ava (Alicia Vikander) to the Turing Test and determine if the android is self-aware. “If you’ve created a conscious machine,” Caleb marvels, “it’s not the history of man. It’s the history of gods.”

“Deus ex machina” is the phrase applied to the climactic moment in a classical Greek tragedy when gods would descend from the skies to resolve all knotty human problems. And god, or God, is the word that hovers over Ex Machina , Alex Garland’s pristinely creepy science-fiction film. Nathan could be the Old Testament God, who created man (Adam-Caleb) in His image, and woman (Eve-Ava) in man’s. So exactly do Ava’s flawless face, sensational figure and sweet demeanor match Caleb’s notion of the perfect woman that he can’t help wondering if Nathan, in designing the robot, “accessed my pornography profile.”

At 13, Nathan devised the code for Bluebook, “the world’s most popular Internet search engine.” Now he runs the company, and dreams up new cool things, from a remote aerie deep inside a forest about the size of the King ranch . Giant crevices form the walls of his home and lab, which the hairy genius lords over like some troll deity, dividing his spare time between working with weights and getting angrily drunk. Having formulated Ava by simultaneously hacking everyone’s personal computer, Nathan has summoned Caleb for a week’s worth of sessions with Ava, one each day. The young man will probe Ava’s mind while Nathan messes with his.

Garland wrote the novel The Beach , which Danny Boyle filmed in 2000 with Leonardo DiCaprio, and penned the original scripts for two other Boyle movies: 28 Days Later… (zombies) and Sunshine (space epic). He also adapted Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go , a story about human clones starring Keira Knightley, Carey Mulligan and Andrew Garfield who think they’re human. This early work, and perhaps his parentage — his mother is a psychoanalyst, his father a political cartoonist — well prepared Garland for his first effort as writer-director, which carries the echo of many horror, sci-fi and adventure tales while speaking in its own distinct, quietly commanding voice.

A chamber piece about the first causes and ultimate effects of grand scientific experiments, Ex Machina may remind you of Duncan Jones’ Moon (a human stranded in a space station with his clone) or Pedro Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In (a brilliant plastic surgeon who imprisons a creature of almost unreal beauty). Ava could be a sister of sorts to three Scarlett Johansson entities: the OS voice in her , the alien in Under the Skin and the turbo-evolving heroine of Lucy . She surely qualifies as “more human than human,” like the androids in Blade Runner (which also had a kind of Turing Test). Look back just a month and find Neil Blomkamp’s Chappie , about the search for human identity of a robot not nearly as dishy as Ava.

The scenario of a ruthless man captivating people in a remote location for his science or sport recalls both H.G. Wells’ 1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau and Richard Connell’s 1924 short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” both of which spawned many movies. And before all these was Frankenstein , the Mary Shelley novel that celebrates its 200th anniversary in 2118, and whose theme of the scientist playing God can accommodate any number of updates, including this one. Nathan, drunk on his own brilliance, is the savant who would breathe a soul into his new machine. Caleb is the ambitious assistant who fancies he can free the lovely automaton from her creator. In this Olympian chess game, Ava also has a role: as pawn, queen or grandmaster.

Nathan has programmed Ava to be appealing, beseeching, vulnerable. “What will happen to me if I fail your test?” she asks Caleb in one of their early sessions. “Do you think I might be switched off?” We too come to think of Ava not as a rat in a maze, hoping only to survive and escape, but as the woman the lonely Caleb must desire. When her relation to her tester warms up, she dons a wig, a print dress and white stockings — to fully simulate human femininity — telling him, “This is what I’d wear on our date.” Nathan seems amused: “Can you blame her for getting a crush on you?”

We might ask: Can a robot fall in love? Could Caleb, or any young human male, resist her requests? By adding sexual attraction to the artificial-intelligence equation, Garland steers his movie into a caustic meditation on the power that men believe they have over women. Nathan has created Ava; Caleb thinks he can be her lord and mate. They should be mindful of Ava’s status: the deus ex machina who might emerge as a dea , a goddess from a machine.

Garland has distilled these big themes into a hyperbaric chamber piece — one location, three main characters, seven days — with a born auteur’s command of actors and atmosphere. Ominous electronic music (by Ben Salisbury, a composer of music for TV nature documentaries, and Geoff Barrow of the jazz-rock band Portishead) pulses through Mark Digby’s lab set — a suitably sterile habitat that is also a wonder of design. Garland is also bold enough to break the tensely contemplative mood with a frenetic dance that Nathan and Ava perform to Oliver Cheatham’s 1983 R&B hit “Get Down Saturday Night.”

Garland also had spectacular acuity or great luck in choosing his actors. Isaac contributes another portrayal in his gallery of overbearing outsiders, after Sucker Punch and Inside Llewyn Davis ; his Nathan thinks that boorishness is an emblem of his superiority. Gleeson, who graduated from playing a lesser Weasley in the last two Harry Potter films (his actor father Brendan was Mad-Eye Moody) to starring as the time-traveling romantic in Richard Curtis’s About Time , is splendid as the questing naïf who gains a backbone to battle Nathan, in the hope he can be Theseus in the Minotaur’s cave.

But the miracle performance is from Vikander, the 26-year-od Swedish actress who starred in the Oscar-nominated Danish film A Royal Affair and made a beguiling international impression as Kitty in the Keira Knightley Anna Karenina . Trained as a dancer, Vikander lends Ava a grace and precision of movement that could be human or mechanical, earthly or ethereal. We can almost watch Ava’s mind work, not because of the see-through plastic casing but because of the actress’s command of each minute stage in her character’s evolution. As a spectral eminence yearning to be a woman beyond Nathan’s or Caleb’s dreams, A.V. makes a great Ava.

She is also the gleaming Exhibit A in the devious experiment that Garland is conducting on the scientist, his acolyte, his robot — and on the viewers. It’s not hard to feel grateful to be his lab rats. Ex Machina is the year’s most seductive high-IQ drama.

Read next: See the Most Iconic Examples of Artificial Intelligence in Film

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Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly described the plot of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go . It is a story about human clones.

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‘ex machina’: film review.

Screenwriter Alex Garland makes the move into directing with a futuristic psy-fi thriller about sentient robots fighting for survival.

By Stephen Dalton

Stephen Dalton

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The potential existential threat to humans posed by the dawning era of artificial intelligence is the theme chosen by British screenwriter Alex Garland for his stylish directing debut. The subject may be familiar, but Garland has a track record of rebooting and revitalizing pulp genres, most notably his “fast zombie” script for Danny Boyle ’s dystopian thriller 28 Days Later. He also worked with Boyle on the screen version of his own cult novel The Beach , and the futuristic space adventure Sunshine .

Despite its modest budget — reportedly around $13 million — Ex Machina looks sleek, shiny and remarkably slick for a directing debut. But it also suffers from the same kind of third-act slump that marred some of Garland’s previous work, promising a psychological depth and dramatic punch that it never quite delivers. That said, this is still a classy piece of cerebral sci-fi, with high production values and hot media buzz that should propel it beyond fanboy circles. It opens in Britain next week, with a U.S. launch planned for SXSW in March followed by an April release through niche distributor A24.

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Ex Machina Review: Finally, an Artificial Intelligence Movie with Some Brains

This image may contain Human Person and Face

After a recent run of overly-hyped , but ultimately disappointing sci-fi efforts, fans of the genre finally have something worth getting excited about. Non genre filmgoers should probably get excited too. For the first time in a long time, we have an artificial intelligence film with, well, intelligence.

Ex Machina , novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland’s directorial debut, treads on the well-worn sci-fi territory of technophobia, god complexes, and lethal robots, but it does so with an intelligence and sophistication that never underestimates either the viewer or the capacity of the genre.

The film kicks off when a nice young coder named Caleb ( Domhnall Gleeson ) wins a mysterious trip to spend a week at the opulent home (more of a compound, really) of Nathan ( Oscar Isaac ), his boss and CEO of fictional internet giant Blue Book. During his visit, Caleb meets two women: Nathan’s assistant and lover Kyoko ( Sonoya Mizuno ) and his invention, a robot named Ava ( Alicia Vikander ). Ava the robot is a CGI confection made of human face, hands, and feet held together by sinewy mesh, translucent limbs, and a see-through torso filled with blinking lights, and whirring gears.

Nathan tasks Caleb with engaging Ava in the “Turing test” (yes, named for that Turing ) in order to determine whether his artificially intelligent creation can think and act like a human. As you might expect in a film about a vulnerable young man, an alluring robot girl, and a billionaire with a god complex locked up in a high-tec bunker, things start to go horribly wrong.

As the screenwriter for the likes of Sunshine, 28 Days Later , and Never Let Me Go , Garland is well-versed in stories of science run amok. All the same, this is a remarkably confident first go for Garland in the director’s chair. Ex Machina is a writerly film with the intimate two-hander scenes and grand speeches you would expect to find in a stage play rather than a visually dazzling bit of sci-fi. But despite its tiny cast (with apologies to Kyoko, there are really only three characters), cramped, narrow hallways, and windowless rooms, Ex Machina never feels like a small film.

Nathan’s claustrophobic underground lair takes on the feel of that classic sci-fi setting: the spaceship. But wide exterior shots (filmed on location in Norway) of lush forests and one particularly stunning glacier play the role of outer space, putting man’s small, technological accomplishments in the context of nature’s vast splendor.

That blurred relationship between the organic and inorganic –– used to best effect in Ava’s elegant flesh and mesh design –– crops up throughout Ex Machina to underline the notion of artificial intelligence as the next, inevitable phase in our evolution. Vikander’s face moves robotically, yes, but also takes on a curious bird-like quality –– bright eyes blinking and inquisitive head tilting.

Ava, enhanced by Vikander’s ethereal performance, is the film’s visual marvel, and Gleeson is effortlessly sympathetic as our audience proxy, Caleb. Yet it’s Oscar Isaac’s very human performance that breathes life into the film. Nathan may be a megalomaniac type we’re all familiar with (Dr. Frankenstein by way of Bluebeard), but Isaac plays the charismatic, cerebral scientist with an unexpected earthy heft. He may be a mental manipulator of the first degree, able to give impromptu sophisticated speeches on Jackson Pollock or A.I.’s role in the evolutionary process, but when Isaac lays into a punching bags, drops vulgarities, or gruntingly hefts a barbell, there’s little doubt as to who the “knuckle-dragging ape” is in this scenario. And Nathan’s tendency to punctuate his sentences with “dude” makes it easy to trace his evolutionary lineage back to the brogrammers of Silicon Valley.

Ex Machina certainly isn’t the only successful artificial intelligence film out there, and Vikander’s crackling honey voice and seductive demeanor make the comparison to Scarlett Johansson in Her pretty inevitable. But while Spike Jonze’s film was all heart, Ex Machina is just brimming with brains. For every obvious cultural reference to scientific disaster (you bet Robert Oppenheimer gets quoted), there’s a subtle one, like snippets of Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark’s 1980s anthem “Enola Gay.” And Garland never lets his camera linger too long on one of Ex Machina ’s visual punches like a fully humanoid robot dressed all in white pausing in front of Klimt’s iconic portrait of Margaret Stonborough Wittgenstein.

Things do get physical, and also violent, but Ex Machina is for the most part a three-way mental battle. With all the over-blown, but empty sci-fi offerings out there, wouldn’t you prefer a nice game of chess?

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Film Review: ‘Ex Machina’

Alex Garland's brittle, beautiful directorial debut is a digital-age 'Frankenstein' refashioned as a battle of the sexes.

By Guy Lodge

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While multiplex fantasy remains an extravagantly caped boys’ club, a stealthy gender inquiry is taking place in more specialized sci-fi territory, with Alex Garland ‘s brittle, beautiful “ Ex Machina ” its latest slyly thoughtful line of questioning. A worthy companion piece to “Under the Skin” and “Her” in its examination of what constitutes human and feminine identity — and whether those two concepts need always overlap — Garland’s long-anticipated directorial debut synthesizes a dizzy range of the writer’s philosophical preoccupations into a sleek, spare chamber piece: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” redreamed as a 21st-century battle of the sexes. Exquisitely designed and electrically performed by Alicia Vikander , Domhnall Gleeson and particularly Oscar Isaac , this uncomplicated but subtly challenging film requires strong word of mouth from its January U.K. release (and its March SXSW premiere) if audiences abroad are to tap its porcelain surface.

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Indeed, the film’s very first frame serves to distance viewers from their own: D.p. Rob Hardy’s camera peers at Caleb in his office as if from the reverse side of his computer screen, while muted audio suggests we’re observing him from a quarantined realm. As it turns out, he’s soon to join us there. It emerges that Caleb has won a competition staged by his employers, the world’s largest Internet provider, to spend a week with enigmatic CEO Nathan (Isaac) at the latter’s expensively hermetic woodland lair — dazzlingly envisioned by production designer Mark Digby as a palatial blend of Philip Johnson severity and Scandinavian laboratory chic.

Upon arrival, however, the wet-behind-the-ears nerd discovers that his golden ticket is no luxury perk: Rather, he’s been recruited to participate in a cloistered research experiment, testing the limits and limitations of Nathan’s stunningly advanced new developments in AI technology. The boss’ most recent breakthrough takes the form of Ava (Vikander), a female-gendered robot whose expressive, peach-soft facial features belie her transparent synthetic form and complex exposed wiring. And so, during the first of Caleb’s seven planned consultation sessions with her, do her casual conversational ability and dry, even flirtatious sense of humor; somewhat surprisingly, Nathan has designed an organism as delicate and genial as he is brusque and self-absorbed.

Caleb’s task is to perform a Turing test on Ava, determining whether her thinking and behavior is, at any level, distinguishable from that of a human being — and if so, where the disconnect lies. (That, of course, makes “Ex Machina” the second film of recent months, following the much-garlanded “The Imitation Game,” to concern itself with the research of computer scientist Alan Turing. Furthermore, it arguably does a better job of honoring his intellectual legacy.) As the interloper falls hard and fast for the android, the test would appear to be passed with flying colors. But is she the only case study? And has her precise degree of consciousness and calculative ability been programmed by her creator, or has his expertise in this department exceeded his control?

As the balance of power wavers between human and humanoid intelligence, a second dividing factor appears in this uneasy, quasi-incestuous love triangle, as Ava exhibits hints of a feminine intuition that the jockish Nathan seems unlikely to have formatted himself — even if, in a provocative detail that opens up further consideration of sexual hierarchy, he made sure to grant her functioning facsimiles of genitalia. “Ex Machina” turns out to be far wittier and more sensual than its coolly unblemished exterior implies; it’s a trick that mirrors Ava’s own apparent Turing-test-defying evolution. As further intricate psychological possibilities unfurl, the pic extends questions of mortality and human construction raised by Garland in his deft 2010 adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s genetic sci-fi parable “Never Let Me Go” — principally that of what humanity is worth if it can be so soulfully replicated.

Isaac has been in such a rare run of form recently that one fears for his ability to surprise, but it’s still intact here. Cutting a more baleful figure than usual with his dense beard and scalp-skimming buzz cut, his Nathan responds to the world around him — the limited world he’s curated for himself, at least — with unfazed-sounding comebacks and laid-back swagger that ultimately betray the strenuous effort behind them. It’s the piercingly funny sendup that the “tech-bro” elite has had coming for too long, but Isaac is too nuanced a performer to leave it there, never neglecting the petulant brilliance that finally makes this designer Dr. Frankenstein a tragic figure.

Garland’s script doesn’t grant Gleeson and Vikander quite the same liberty to play, but both actors turn in remarkably disciplined work, articulating a burgeoning romance in which the boundary between real and simulated feeling is kept teasingly ambiguous throughout. Swedish export Vikander, whose shimmering physical presence increasingly recalls that of her compatriot Ingrid Bergman, aces a particularly tough assignment in Ava, a cipher whose every gesture and vocal inflection renders her at once more human and less explicably alien.

Filmed on an approximate budget of just $15 million, the film looks and sounds immaculate at every turn, with its contained, interior-based three-hander structure permitting the money to be lavished less on locations and more on eerily vivid digital and prosthetic effects. (The film’s sporadic attempts to “open out” proceedings, as when a dialogue-driven scenes is situated by a waterfall rather than one of Nathan’s airtight suites, are more a distraction than an asset.) The effects and makeup teams have made Ava a robot of strikingly brutal grace, her flesh bluntly disrupted by metallic components.

Fresh off his elegant work on period dramas “The Invisible Woman” and “Testament of Youth,” Hardy brings equivalent visual propriety and composure to a more futuristic mood piece, while composers Ben Salisbury and Portishead frontman Geoff Barrow contribute a bristling electronic score that swarms and simmers with the characters’ own emotional surges. Given Barrow’s presence, one half expects the film to close with his band’s signature hit “Glory Box,” the key refrain of which — “Give me a reason to be a woman” — would aptly sum up its hybrid heroine’s own state of mind.

Reviewed at Vue West End, London, Jan. 12, 2015. (In SXSW Film Festival.) MPAA Rating: R. Running time: 107 MIN.

Production: (U.K.-U.S.) A Universal release of a Universal Pictures Intl., Film4 presentation of a DNA Films production. Produced by Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich. Executive producers, Scott Rudin, Eli Bush, Tessa Ross.
Crew: Directed, written by Alex Garland. Camera (color, widescreen, HD), Rob Hardy; editor, Mark Day; music, Ben Salisbury, Geoff Barrow; production designer, Mark Digby; art director, Denis Schnegg; set decorator, Michelle Day; costume designer, Sammy Sheldon Differ; sound (Dolby Digital), Mitch Low; supervising sound editor, Glenn Freemantle; re-recording mixers, Ian Tapp, Niv Adiri; makeup designer, Sian Grigg; visual effects supervisor, Andrew Whitehurst; visual effects, Double Negative; stunt coordinator, Andy Bennett; line producer, Caroline Levy; associate producer, Joanne Smith; assistant director, Nick Heckstall-Smith; casting, Francine Maisler.
With: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno, Claire Selby, Symara Templeman, Gana Bayarsaikhan, Tiffany Pisani, Lina Alminas.

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User reviews

A young programmer is selected to participate in a ground-breaking experiment in synthetic intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a highly advanced humanoid A.I. A young programmer is selected to participate in a ground-breaking experiment in synthetic intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a highly advanced humanoid A.I. A young programmer is selected to participate in a ground-breaking experiment in synthetic intelligence by evaluating the human qualities of a highly advanced humanoid A.I.

Alex Garland
Alicia Vikander
Domhnall Gleeson
Oscar Isaac
1.1K User reviews
429 Critic reviews
78 Metascore
74 wins & 161 nominations total

Top cast 14

(as Symara Templeman)

(as Lina Alminas)

Office Worker
(uncredited)

Office Manager
All cast & crew
Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

Trivia The location of the house in the movie is the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway.
Goofs When Ava and Kyoko meet in the corridor, there are masks on the wall. At the end of the scene, the masks are gone. Correction: The camera angle is not a reverse shot along the same corridor with the masks. The camera has moved to where Kyoto is standing, turned 90 degrees right and is looking down the corridor she came from. When Nathan finds them, he is looking from the other end of the corridor where Kyoto came from.

Nathan : One day the AIs are going to look back on us the same way we look at fossil skeletons on the plains of Africa. An upright ape living in dust with crude language and tools, all set for extinction.

Caleb : I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.

Nathan : There you go again, Mr. Quotable.

Caleb : There you go again. It's not my quote. It's what Oppenheimer said after he made

Nathan , Caleb : The atomic bomb.

Nathan : Yeah, I know what it is, dude.

Crazy credits The end credits starts with a single dot in the background which then grows and various patterns emerge from it.
Alternate versions The alternatively censored cut released in China featured frequent blurs of nudity and, on occasion, violence. One scene towards the end also seemed to be zoomed for no apparent reason.
Connections Featured in Film '72: Episode #44.2 (2015)
Soundtracks Schubert Piano Sonata No.21 in B Flat Major, D.960 Composed by Franz Schubert Performed by Alfred Brendel Courtesy of Decca Under license from Universal Music Operations Limited

User reviews 1.1K

Sleepin_Dragon
Jan 11, 2023
Is this based on the anime/comic/RPG of the same name?
What does the title "Ex Machina" mean ?
Why did Universal decide not to release this film in the USA?
April 24, 2015 (United States)
United Kingdom
United States
Official Facebook
Official site (Japan)
Người Máy Trỗi Dậy
Juvet Landscape Hotel, Alstad, Valldal, Norway (Nathan's mountain retreat)
Universal Pictures
See more company credits at IMDbPro
$15,000,000 (estimated)
$25,442,958
Apr 12, 2015
$37,394,629

Technical specs

Runtime 1 hour 48 minutes
Dolby Digital