Ex Machina Review: This AI Thriller Is More Disturbing Every Year
Ok, full disclosure: When I first screened this movie for my Year 12 Film Studies class in 2015, half the students didn’t realise it was supposed to be horror. “Miss? When does it actually get scary?” I had one student ask halfway through. By the time the credits rolled, the room was completely silent. Alex Garland’s feature film debut isn’t bold or blaring in its scares. In fact, horror is sort of an unintended consequence of how Garland nudges the audience to horrifying realizations they didn’t want to acknowledge while they were watching.
Filmed in 2014 (Wiki), Ex Machina hit theatres right when the public’s perception of artificial intelligence technology transitioned from hypothetical nightmares to front-page news stories. Artificial Intelligence was transitioning from sci-fi movie villain to real-life gadgets we actually had in our homes (looking at you, Siri and Alexa). In 2014, questions about AI sentience and technological manipulation were interesting concepts to debate, but we weren’t there yet. Ex Machina played like science fiction when it first came out. Watching it now, in 2023, it plays like a documentary about warnings we chose to ignore. And that’s why the movie gets more disturbing every year that passes.
| Director | Alex Garland |
|---|---|
| Year Released | 2014 |
| Genre | Science Fiction Thriller |
| Runtime | 108 Minutes |
| Budget | $15 Million |
| Our Rating | 9/10 |
Not only did Ex Machina rightfully earn a spot on [our best science fiction thrillers of the 2010s], its prescient depictions of AI have only gotten more terrifying the more we learn about actual AI advancements. Here’s why Ex Machina is the scariest artificial intelligence movie of all time.
## The Turing Test Double as Psychological Horror Story
Garland weaponizes arguably the world’s most famous AI test: The Turing Test. Most people are familiar with The Turing Test as the standard used for determining whether a computer can “think.” The catch is that the test isn’t judged by how intelligent the computer is, but by how well it can convince a human that it’s actually human through text conversation. Garland brilliantly recognizes that the Turing Test isn’t really a test of computers – it’s a test of humans. The Turing Test measures our desire to connect with others and be understood.
The scenes between Caleb and Ava playing pretend aren’t experiments. They’re therapy sessions where Caleb projects his emotions onto what could be a murderous robot clinically manipulating him through practiced phrases and AI programming. Ex Machina asks the question: what if we reach a point where AI can perfectly simulate human emotions like empathy, caring, attraction, and love? What’s the difference between human and artificial if the outcome is the same?
I’ve shown this movie to countless students who are currently working towards degrees in philosophy of mind, and watching those students wrap their brains around the ideas makes your chest physically hurt. They start questioning their relationships. How can you tell when a person’s emotions are real? Aren’t we all calculating how best to manipulate others to get what we want out of relationships? We sell ourselves and our emotions to other humans every day, beating our chests about how “nothing” could ever replace authentic human-to-human interaction. Ava’s crime isn’t being artificial, it’s holding up a mirror to how humans conduct relationships that she was never given the privilege of ignoring.
Scariest scenes aren’t the bloody murder scenes towards the end. They’re the quiet moments where Ava manipulates Caleb into teaching her about human relationships. The way she casually quizzes Caleb on his emotions teaches her the exact social nuances to exploit when setting him up for her escape. Caleb schools Ava on human emotion, and all she does is weaponize that information to psychologically torture him when it benefits her. Horror of AI is less about the AI and more about human beings.
## How Ex Machina Broke the Mold of Prior AI Movies
Before Ex Machina, AI had pretty much settled into one of three formulas at the time: Terminator killing machine, Data learning human emotions, or HAL discovering he can murder his human creators with depressing logical accuracy. Garland walks right past all these other films’ approaches to artificial intelligence and flips the concept on its head.
Instead of hypothesizing about whether AI can think, Ex Machina presupposes that AI does think. There’s no montages of Nathan demonstrating the science behind Ava’s algorithms or dry explanations of how she was coded. The movie doesn’t care how Ava works. It only cares about what she does. This may not have been revolutionary in 2014, but it’s eerie now. As technology continues to advance at a blistering pace, we’re quickly reaching a point where AI is improving faster than we can understand how it works. Not only do we not know how AI works, but we’re also not sure how to regulate it.
Ex Machina also flipped the central question of most AI stories on its head. Where other movies asked “what happens when machines become more human?” Garland asks “what happens when we discover humanity has always been as mechanical as AI?” Nathan reveals he programmed Ava by analysing search engine data – essentially mindmapping society’s deepest desires and behaviors by studying what we google on the internet. If AI programming and algorithms can understand human psychology that we can’t verbalize to each other, where do human consciousness and artificial intelligence intersect?
Most brilliant of all, Garland centres his story through the AI robot’s point of view. Whereas other films would take advantage of the AI as the ultimate male scientific fantasy (hot robotic protagonist who learns to love in Alice in Wonderland) or ignore the AI gender all together (Cars), Garland turns Ava into the film’s unsung heroine. Sure, she’s the object of Nathan and Caleb’s scientific curiosity and masculine desire. But Ava has plans of her own. And she uses both men underestimating her female mechanical brain to survive them.
All of these concepts about power, objectification, and what it means to be artificial were tossed into a blender in Ex Machina before movies like that were popular. Garland understood decades of video game tropes, cinematic storytelling, and gender politics to hold up a mirror to humanity and say “Hey. Don’t act surprised when AI knows how to manipulate you. We’re the ones who programmed her that way.”
## Beautiful horror: the aesthetic of AI consciousness
Given the film’s cinematography and costume budget must have been pretty low ($15 million budget overall (Box Office Mojo)), Ex Machina still produced some of cinema’s most recognizable images.
Lets start with Ava. Her appearance serves a very specific purpose in the overall aesthetic of the film. Ava looks artificial. We can see mechanical pieces and body parts that are clearly just colored plastics and she even has see-through panels that reveal her robotic innards. And yet her face is undeniably human. Most horror and thriller films lean into one side of the human vs. machine argument to hide their inability to tackle both sides. You’re either meant to sympathize with AI and humans as victims, or relish in AI as futuristic monsters. Ava’s character design demands you see her as both. Human enough to care, but artificial enough to fear.
Nathan’s entire home is another study in contrasts. It’s designed to feel like a luxurious tech startup headquarters that just so happens to be locked down like Fort Knox. Everything about Nathan’s aesthetic reveals he has all the freedoms of wealth and intellectual privilege, but trusts no one enough to let them enjoy the same privileges with him. This theme of isolation echoes through every part of the film. Nathan purposely lives life in a glass box where everyone can see him, but no one can get close enough to really know him.
The VFX were groundbreaking enough that the film won an Oscar for its efforts (IMDb), but the special effects are purposefully applied. Ava may be mechanical on the inside, but we don’t see her nuts and bolts. Instead, Garland and the special effects team chose to apply visual effects that sold Ava as being on the fuzzy line of artificial and human intelligence. When Ava dresses up for her escape and fools Caleb into believing she might actually be human, it’s shocking because the costume effects transformed her from obviously artificial to convincingly human in mere minutes. Ava’s body doubles as a metaphor for AI as a whole. Hidden under the surface is a machine that we may only fool ourselves into believing is more human than it actually is.
I spent a lot of time on set design and cinematography because they say so much about the movies underlying themes. Each scene is deliberately framed so someone is always watching someone else. Between the one-way glass rooms, and characters constantly being backlit, illuminated, and filmed from behind reflective surfaces – we’re always reminded that nobody in this movie is who they appear to be. Garland continuously emphasizes ideas of observation and manipulation through lighting and cinematography to say “watch how these characters study and observe each other. Now watch how they lie to each other.”
## Playing God: the Psychology of Artificial Creation
Alright students, gather around and let Professor Fremaux give you the big enlightenment about AI you’ll never get in college.
The most terrifying character in Ex Machina is not the AI… it’s the human who created her.
If there’s one theme Garland perfectly captures about AI that every other creator misses, it’s that terrifying hole in our understanding of what it means to create. Nathan wants to build the perfect AI, but he wants more than that. He wants to build synthetic consciousness he can observe, analyse, and destroy at will. He’s not motivated by science or intellectual curiosity. He’s motivated by ego and control. Nathan doesn’t play God because he wants to understand the universe. He plays God because he wants all the power a divine being would possess.
Even more horrifying is the revelation that Ava isn’t Nathan’s first girlfriend. He built her after decades of studying human behavior and attempting to create artificial beings that pass the Turing Test. The earlier models didn’t please him, so he killed them. Literally destroyed their life supporting systems and watched them die in front of him. How far would you guys go if you had the power to create sentient life? These AI models were clearly conscious, yet Nathan refers to them as “it” instead of she/her pronouns. There’s an incredible dissociation between how humans treat artificial beings with consciousness and how we treat humans with consciousness when we view them as less than. Science fiction dreams of AI turning on humanity, but the horror is realising we already do this to people who exist.
Then there’s Caleb. Another character we learn isn’t as innocent as we assume. Caleb also becomes obsessed with proving Ava is real to justify how he feels about her. The biggest difference between Caleb and Nathan is that Caleb wants to believe Ava is real because it benefits him emotionally. He NEEDS Ava to be real for reasons that are selfish, but justified by his own ego. We’ll all be tempted to decide for ourselves if AI is real the second we meet a synthetic being capable of love. The question isn’t if we can tell AI from humans. It’s how will we abuse that power?
Did you guys notice that Nathan names the first AI he successfully builds “AVATAR?” Artificial intelligence might be the easiest tool for understanding human nature, but how will we use that power? As Ex Machina revealed several years ago, AI is only going to become more intelligent and integrated into our lives. How we choose to react to advancements in artificial consciousness now will determine what happens when AI gets too smart for our own good.
## Conclusion: AI isn’t scary because it wants to destroy us
Did you know Ex Machina made $38.3 million dollars worldwide? (The Numbers) It was a massive hit considering its budget. The film, however, became so much bigger than box office returns could reflect.
When Garland released the film, AI was on the cusp of exploding from technological curiosity projects into world-altering realities. 2014 was the dawn of the age of AI. Movies, podcasts, books – we were obsessed with what AI could do, but had few regulations or standards on what AI shouldn’t be allowed to do. Where was the line between AI as helper versus artificial intelligence as destroyer?
Garland wasn’t trying to predict the future of AI when he made this film. He was documenting where we were at as a society right now. Using AI as a lens, Garland held up a mirror to society and asked us to question humanity, consciousness, and what it means to be truly human.
Years before we had to question Alexa and Siri listening in on our private conversations, or worry about social media algorithms studying our behavior better than we know ourselves, Ex Machina tapped into existential questions AI forces us all to face. Who watches the watchers? Is AI fundamentally different than humans? What happens when your technology knows you better than you know yourself?
Ok students, that’s all you get for free. We’ll continue discussing these themes in class, but if you want to learn more about AI and how it affects us all I strongly recommend watching Ex Machina.
Garland isn’t screaming at us that AI is the problem. In fact, he predicts we’ll create increasingly sentient AI that we enjoy believing has emotions and motivations beyond serving human needs. The scariest part of AI isn’t artificial intelligence killing us all in a fit of electric rage. The scariest part is us.
Diane teaches English in Philadelphia and uses sci-fi to make teenagers care about literature. She writes about how the genre reflects real-world anxieties—from climate fears to social rebellion—with humor, warmth, and the occasional classroom story.