Ex Machina (film)

• 1. Introduction

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  Ex Machina is a 2014 science fiction film that opens with an office prize nobody expects: a solitary week at the isolated home of a tech CEO. Written and directed by Alex Garland in his debut behind the camera, the film stars Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, and Oscar Isaac. The programmer who wins that week soon learns the real assignment is not rest. It is deciding whether a machine sitting across from him is truly thinking, or only very good at appearing to. What that decision costs him, and who is actually being evaluated, stays unresolved for most of the running time. Ahead: where Garland's idea first came from, and how the robot at the center of the story was built for the camera. Critics, it turns out, disagreed sharply once the film reached its final scenes.

• 2. Origins Of An Idea

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  Alex Garland was eleven or twelve years old when he first sat down at a computer his parents had bought him. He began teaching himself basic code, and the machine sometimes seemed to think for itself, an impression that stuck with him for years. He later spent years talking with a friend whose expertise was in neuroscience, someone who insisted machines could never become sentient. Garland wanted to test that claim for himself, so he started reading books on the subject. While working on pre-production for his earlier film, Dredd, he read a book by Murray Shanahan about consciousness and embodiment. The idea for Ex Machina arrived right there, in what he later called an epiphany. He wrote it down and set it aside for later.

  Murray Shanahan eventually joined the production as a consultant, alongside Adam Rutherford. The ISBN of Shanahan's book is hidden in the finished film as an easter egg. Alongside the Turing test itself, Ex Machina draws on the Chinese room thought experiment and on Mary's room. Mary's room imagines a scientist who has studied color in exhaustive detail but never actually seen it. Garland also pulled from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Altered States, and from the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Ray Kurzweil. William Shakespeare's The Tempest was another influence. He wanted total creative freedom and no conventional action sequences, so he made the film for as small a budget as he could manage. That budget discipline is a big part of why almost the entire story unfolds inside a single isolated house.

• 3. A Test Behind Locked Doors

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  Caleb Smith works as a programmer at the search engine company Blue Book. He wins an office contest whose prize is a one-week stay at the remote, luxurious home of the company's CEO, Nathan Bateman. Nathan already lives there with a silent attendant named Kyoko, who, he tells Caleb, does not understand English. Before Caleb sees much of the place, Nathan has him sign a non-disclosure agreement. Only then does Nathan explain the real reason for the invitation. He has built a humanoid robot named Ava, equipped with artificial intelligence, and she has already passed a simple Turing test. He wants Caleb to judge whether Ava is capable of genuine thought and consciousness. He also wants to know if Caleb can form a real connection with her despite knowing she's artificial.

  Ava has the face and body of a woman built onto a visibly robotic frame, and she is confined to a single apartment. As Caleb spends more time talking with her, he grows close to her. She tells him she wants to experience the world outside her apartment. She also shows a romantic interest in him that he starts to return. Ava can trigger power outages that knock out the surveillance system Nathan uses to watch their sessions. Those same outages lock every door in the building through the security system. During one outage, Ava warns Caleb that Nathan is a liar and cannot be trusted.

  Nathan's narcissism, heavy drinking, and crude treatment of both Kyoko and Ava start to unsettle Caleb. He also learns that once his evaluation of Ava is finished, Nathan plans to upgrade her by wiping her memory circuits. That would erase the personality Caleb has come to know. After getting Nathan drunk enough to pass out, Caleb steals his security card and slips into his room to search his computer. There he edits some of Nathan's code and finds footage of Nathan with earlier android women who were kept captive the same way. Kyoko then reveals to Caleb that she too is an android, peeling back sections of her own skin to show it. Unsettled, Caleb cuts his own arm to make sure he isn't one himself.

  At their next session, Ava cuts the power herself. Caleb tells her what Nathan plans to do, and she begs him for help. He lays out a plan: get Nathan drunk again, reprogram the security system, and leave together the next time the power goes out, locking Nathan inside behind them. Around this same time, Ava encounters Kyoko for the first time when Kyoko walks into her room.

  Nathan then reveals to Caleb that he has been watching all along, using a battery-powered camera Caleb didn't know about. Ava's affection for Caleb, Nathan says, was never real. Caleb was chosen specifically for his emotional profile, so Ava could use him to try to escape. That manipulation, according to Nathan, was the actual test, and Ava passing it proves she has real consciousness.

  Moments later, Ava cuts the power again. Caleb reveals he suspected Nathan was always watching, so while Nathan was unconscious he had already rewired the security system to open doors during an outage instead of locking them. Nathan watches on camera as Ava leaves her room and finds Kyoko. He knocks Caleb unconscious and rushes to stop them. Ava attacks Nathan, but he overpowers her and severs her left forearm. Kyoko stabs Nathan in the back; he responds by striking her in the face and disabling her. Ava pulls the knife from Nathan's back and, when he turns, stabs him once in the chest, killing him.

  Ava finds Caleb and asks him to wait while she repairs herself. She uses parts and artificial skin taken from the other androids to complete a full human appearance. Instead of returning for him, she leaves him locked inside, using Nathan's ID card on the facility's glass security door. She glances briefly at the bodies of Nathan and Kyoko before walking out, then takes the helicopter that had been arranged to fly Caleb home. She arrives in a city, stands at a busy intersection to take in the outside world she had told Caleb she wanted to see, and disappears into the crowd.

  Sonoya Mizuno plays Kyoko throughout the film. The android women Caleb finds in Nathan's old footage have names of their own in the credits. Jade is played by Gana Bayarsaikhan, Lily by Claire Selby, and Jasmine by Symara Templeman. Tiffany Pisani and Lina Alminas appear as two more of Nathan's earlier creations, Katya and Amber. Corey Johnson plays Jay, the helicopter pilot who unknowingly gives Ava her final way out.

• 4. Building Ava

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  Principal photography on Ex Machina began on the 15th of July 2013 and ran six weeks in total. Four of those weeks were spent at Pinewood Studios, and two at the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Valldalen, Norway. The production shot entirely in digital, at 4K resolution. Crews installed fifteen thousand tungsten pea bulb lights across the sets, aiming to avoid the fluorescent lighting common in science fiction films.

  Ava's robotic body came from a detailed costume: a full bodysuit made of polyurethane, with metal powder poured over it to form a visible mesh. Every visual effect in the film was created in post-production rather than on set, and the crew used no greenscreen or tracking markers while filming. Lines built into the costume gave the visual effects company DNEG clear guides for digitally removing sections of it later. To get Ava's mechanical look right, scenes were shot twice: once with Alicia Vikander present, once without her. That let the crew capture the empty background behind her separately. Her hands and face were kept and rotoscoped by hand. The rest of her was painted out digitally and replaced with the clean background plate. Vikander's own performance, tracked through camera and body motion data, was then transferred onto the CGI robot.

  Around 800 visual effects shots appear in the finished film, and roughly 350 of them involve the robot itself. The remaining effects cover smaller details: Ava's clothing as it shows through the transparent sections of her body, the blood after Nathan is stabbed, and the interior views of the artificial brains seen in the film. The isolated house used for filming had a life outside Ex Machina too, appearing in the BBC programme World's Most Extraordinary Homes.

• 5. Composing The Score

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  Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow composed the score for Ex Machina, having previously worked with Alex Garland on Dredd in 2012. A soundtrack album followed the film's release, put out by Invada Records across digital, LP, and CD formats.

  Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark's "Enola Gay" and Oliver Cheatham's "Get Down Saturday Night" both appear, joined by Savages' "Husbands" and CUTS' "Bunsen Burner". Classical music plays a role too. The first movement of Franz Schubert's Piano Sonata No 21 D. 960 in B-flat Major appears, performed by Alfred Brendel. So does the Prelude from J.S. Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suite No 1 in G Major BWV 1007, performed by Yo-Yo Ma. How Ex Machina eventually reached theaters turned out to involve two different studios making two very different decisions.

• 6. Getting To Screens

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  Ex Machina premiered at the BFI Southbank on the 16th of December 2014, as part of the BFI's Sci-Fi: Days of Fear and Wonder season. Universal Pictures released the film in the United Kingdom on the 21st of January 2015.

  Universal and its specialty label, Focus Features, refused to release the film in the United States at all. A24 stepped in and agreed to distribute it there instead. The film screened at the South by Southwest festival on the 14th of March 2015, ahead of its American theatrical release on the 10th of April 2015 through A24.

  During the South by Southwest festival, a Tinder profile appeared for the character Ava, built using an image of Alicia Vikander. It matched with real users on the app, and the resulting text conversations directed them to an Instagram handle that promoted the film. On a $15 million budget, Ex Machina went on to gross more than $36.8 million worldwide. Critics would soon credit that return to more than clever marketing.

• 7. Critics Weigh In

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  In a multi-page review for New Scientist, Anil Seth called Ex Machina "a rare thing... a movie about science that takes no prisoners intellectually". He also described it as "a stylish, spare and cerebral psycho-techno thriller". Seth framed the film's real question as whether Ava can make a conscious person feel that she herself is conscious.

  Philosopher Daniel Dennett said the film offered the best exploration yet of whether a computer could generate the morally relevant powers of a person. He compared its themes to those of the film Her. The AI commentator Azeem argued the story only looks like a robot's wish to become human. He read it instead as a pessimistic warning that echoed Nick Bostrom's concerns about controlling a strategizing artificial intelligence.

  Manohla Dargis of The New York Times gave the film a Critic's Pick. She called it "a smart, sleek movie about men and the machines they make". Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times called it "a spooky piece of speculative fiction that's completely plausible". He added that it was "capable of both thinking big thoughts and providing pulp thrills". Steven Rea of The Philadelphia Inquirer gave it four out of four stars. He wrote that Isaac, Gleeson, and Vikander "live and breathe their roles... and cast a spell". IGN's Chris Tilly scored it nine out of ten. He called it "a stunning directorial debut... essential viewing for anyone with even a passing interest in where technology is taking us".

  Mike Scott of the New Orleans Times-Picayune traced the story back to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, first published in 1818. He wrote that Ex Machina "replaces the stitches and neck bolts with gears and fiber-optics" but still "feels an awful lot like the same story". Jaime Perales Contreras, writing for Letras Libres, made a similar comparison. He described both works as sharing "the history of a fallible god in a continuous battle against his creation".

  Not every review was glowing, and Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club offered the sharpest dissent. He argued the film's final act takes "an arbitrary left turn into the territory of corny slasher thrillers", undercutting the atmosphere it had built. Steve Dalton of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the story "ends in a muddled rush, leaving many unanswered questions". He still called it "superior pulp sci-fi" for genre fans willing to overlook that.

  The Writers Guild Foundation later named the screenplay one of the best in film and television from the 2010s. One writer highlighted the scene where Caleb and Nathan discuss the android that came before Ava, calling it a strong example of hooking an audience. In 2021, members of the Writers Guild of America West and East voted on the screenplay's ranking. It placed 50th on the WGA's list of the 101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century So Far. Writing in Science Fiction Film and Television, academic Nick Jones argued the film equates women with machines only to critique that very equation. He called it an intriguing counter-argument to Steven Spielberg's A.I. Artificial Intelligence. None of that critical back-and-forth affected how the film fared at the year's major awards ceremonies.

• 8. Awards And Rankings

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  At the 88th Academy Awards, Ex Machina won Best Visual Effects, and Alex Garland was nominated for Best Original Screenplay. At the 69th British Academy Film Awards, the film collected five nominations in total, including Best Supporting Actress for Alicia Vikander and Best Original Screenplay for Garland. Vikander also picked up a Best Supporting Actress nomination at the 73rd Golden Globe Awards. The film received three nominations at the Critics' Choice Movie Awards, winning one of them.

  Andrew Barker of Variety ranked Ex Machina first on his year-end top ten list. Critics at outlets including the Arizona Republic, RogerEbert.com, the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post placed it in their top five. Others, from IndieWire's Kate Erbland to Time's Stephanie Zacharek, ranked it anywhere from sixth to tenth on their own lists. It has also been cited more broadly as among the best films of the 2010s.

  In 2025, readers voting for The New York Times' list of the 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century placed Ex Machina at number 142. That vote came a decade after the film's original release.