One of the films I am most looking forward to at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival is Ex Machina, the directorial debut of writer Alex Garland (28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go). I know it’s not a world premiere, and it has already opened in plenty of territories, but the word coming out of the places it has already played has me quite excited.
The film features a trio of actors I think are terrific: Domhnall Gleeson, Alicia Vikander, and Oscar Isaac. Seeing these three tackle a science-fiction drama written by a guy who has previously given us very thoughtful genre films is very interesting to me. So, it will be one I will make sure I do not miss during my jam-packed festival.
Ex Machina has a new poster for you all to admire below. It’s a fairly simple one, featuring Alicia Vikander front and center. It’s not weird that she looks really great as a robot, right? We all think that. Okay, good. A new trailer will premiere tomorrow, for those of you out there who watch trailers.
Caleb Smith (Domhnall Gleeson), a programmer at an internet-search giant, wins a competition to spend a week at the private mountain estate of the company’s brilliant and reclusive CEO, Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac). Upon his arrival, Caleb learns that Nathan has chosen him to be the human component in a Turing Test–charging him with evaluating the capabilities, and ultimately the consciousness, of Nathan’s latest experiment in artificial intelligence. That experiment is Ava (Alicia Vikander), a breathtaking A.I. whose emotional intelligence proves more sophisticated, seductive–and more deceptive–than the two men could have imagined.
