Ex Machina

A piece of advice: Turn down the volume down every time an Ex Machina commercial comes on TV. The ads reveal way too much— and the less you know going into this film the better.

Here's what I can tell you about Alex Garland's confident directorial debut: Young Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), who works for a Google-like search engine, "wins" the opportunity to spend the week with the company's reclusive genius founder, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) in his secluded mountainside estate. Did I say secluded? You can only get there by helicopter—and then partially on foot—and most of the house is an underground bunker, with no windows and futuristically minimal decor. As for Nathan, he's a disarming mixture of distant and chummy, peppering his language with "dudes" and "pals" that seem decidedly forced and explaining to Caleb that some rooms in the house are strictly off limits.

Nathan wants Caleb to conduct a so-called Turing Test on his latest invention, an A.I. named Ava (Alicia Vikander) who, save for some visible hardware in her mid section and neck, looks like a beautiful, bald woman. But can she convince Caleb that she's a thinking, sentient being? Nathan puts them in a room together and observes their interactions via a video surveillance system, and later stacks the deck by telling Caleb that Ava can have sex and experience her version of pleasure. (For what it's worth, this is the second male-helmed science fiction film I've seen in recent months—the first was Under the Skin—that manages to gratuitously feature an alien/A.I. babe exploring her naked "human" form in the mirror. I'm onto you, dudes.)

Ex Machina is in the tradition of mad genius movies, from Frankenstein to Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde to The Island of Dr. Moreau. The fun is figuring out just what Nathan's secret (and possibly insidious) agenda is—and, of course, watching Oscar Isaac work. The brilliance of Isaac's performance is how close to alpha male "normal" Nathan seems, with just the tiniest hint of something more sinister beneath the surface. A scene where Nathan does a staged disco performance for Caleb is as hilarious as it is unsettling.

Ex Machina is part science fiction, part horror, part brain bender—and a whole lot of fun. And now, go see it—before another one of those damn commercials airs.