This romantic sci-fi horror is way more unsettling than it looks

Romance, sci-fi, and horror are not subgenres that go together very often, but when they do, we get memorable masterpieces like Ex Machina, which came out in 2014 and which seems more prescient than ever today.

Why? Well, Ex Machina is about a computer programmer named Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) who is chosen to visit the luxurious home of his billionaire boss, Nathan (Oscar Isaac). His job is to speak to a humanoid android named Ava (Alicia Vikander) to determine if she has consciousness. In the process, he falls for her.

In a world where people openly admit to being in love with ChatGPT, Ex Machina is looking less and less like a movie and more like a documentary made 10 years too early.

Romance is scary enough when it’s with humans

What do robots want?

I’ll admit that calling Ex Machina a “romance” might be a bit of an exaggeration — the sci-fi and horror elements are more prominent — but romance remains an important part of the mix. It’s pretty clear that Caleb is taken with Ava pretty soon after meeting her, even if she has a wireframe body and even if he knows she’s not human. But that’s what’s scary about it: attraction isn’t rational. Caleb has all the facts but is beguiled by Ava anyway. The heart wants what the heart wants, even if what the heart wants is a machine that could wreak untold horrors upon humanity if she’s given half a chance.

We hear a lot today about scientists laboring to achieve “artificial general intelligence,” a machine intelligence that matches or surpasses human intelligence. If that happens, what would stop the robots from dominating us? Fear of this idea runs underneath Ex Machina, long before it was widely talked about. Who’s in control? Is it Nathan, a hedonist tech bro who will probably remind you of some real-life public figures? Is it Caleb, who is inspired to help Ava even more after he sees how Nathan mistreats her? Or is it Ava, manipulating everything using her superior intelligence? If we’re talking about AGI, my money’s on the android.

I won’t spoil the specifics, but the ending of Ex Machina is chilling in what it implies about the future of man and machine. This was unsettling even back when Ex Machina first came out, but given how technology has developed over the last several years, it was actually more unsettling than we even knew. The movie has aged extremely well, and I predict it’ll only become more relevant in the future.

Ex Machina as a movie

Not everything has to be all deep and important and stuff

Of course, you can just enjoy watching Ex Machina without thinking about these kinds of existential questions. It’s a very well-made movie directed by Alex Garland, who went on to make movies like Annihilation and Civil War. His next big project will be a movie based on Elden Ring, a video game so great we’re still looking for others like it.

In Garland’s hands, Ex Machina becomes an intimate, eerie sci-fi drama that doesn’t need to do too much to be effective. The cast is small: it’s mostly just Caleb, Nathan, Ava, and a mysterious woman named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), who plays a small but crucial role in the story I won’t reveal here. All of them give great performances that hint at successful careers ahead. Ex Machina came out a year before Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson had their profiles raised considerably after appearing in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and four years before Alicia Vikander snagged the lead role in 2018’s Tomb Raider movie. Watching Ex Machina, it’s clear that all of them deserved their success. They work wonderfully together.

At one hour and 48 minutes long, Ex Machina is also a tightly paced movie, if not among the fastest sci-fi flicks on record. It’s a solid, scary, sometimes weirdly sweet sci-fi movie that will make you think…and hopefully won’t fill you with too much ontological dread.

Ex Machina is already here, more or less

Just maybe not as slickly directed

As you can see in the video above, there are already people who are romantically involved with AI avatars; this woman, Yurina Noguchi, called off her engagement to her human fiancé on ChatGPT’s advice and eventually married the machine. And hers is not the only such example. As the technology continues to improve and as humanoid robots become more advanced, I only expect this kind of thing to become more common.

Clearly, Ex Machina wasn’t that far off the mark: we can already fall in love with robots even when they’re not much more than disembodied voices. Right now, you might be worried about your robot vacuum stealing your data. Maybe you should be worried about it stealing your heart. And what happens when they start looking and moving like Oscar Isaac and Alicia Vikander?

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Love, death, and robots

I don’t think the real-world story of human-robot romance will play out quite as slickly and stylishly as it does in Ex Machina. Real-world examples will probably be kind of funny in an “I can’t believe what I’m looking at” sort of way, at least until they become so common that the people holding out are the weird ones. Maybe by then, Ex Machina will look like a romantic comedy.

Whatever its future, it’s obvious that Ex Machina got at something real and unsettling. It might be the most romantic romance movie ever made, nor the most imaginative sci-fi movie, nor the scariest horror movie, but it’s the best romantic sci-fi horror movie on record.