Ex Machina

Every so often a film shows up that seems built for exactly one mood, and “Ex Machina”, released in 2015, is one of those titles. It is easy to see why it keeps getting recommended long after its initial release.

“There is nothing more human than the will to survive.” That is the tagline, and it does a surprisingly honest job of setting the tone before a single frame plays. At the center of it are Domhnall Gleeson as Caleb, Alicia Vikander as Ava, Oscar Isaac as Nathan, whose choices carry most of the emotional weight from the opening stretch onward. The drama and science fiction framing gives the story a clear emotional lane to run in, and it rarely strays from it without good reason.

It helps to think of it less as a checklist of drama and science fiction tropes and more as a mood the filmmakers commit to fully; once you buy into that mood in the first ten minutes, the rest of the runtime pays it off.

Sound design and score work quietly in the background here, doing the kind of unglamorous work that only gets noticed when it is missing.

Thematically, the film keeps returning to android, artificial intelligence (a.i.), dancing, distrust, friendship — recurring ideas that TMDB’s own tagging picks up on and that show up in how the story is structured scene to scene.

Further down the call sheet, Sonoya Mizuno, Corey Johnson, Claire Selby round things out, and the film is generous enough with screen time that none of them feel like an afterthought.

First-time viewers and longtime fans of Alex Garland tend to walk away with slightly different takeaways, which is usually a sign there is more going on beneath the surface than a single viewing can fully catch.

Alex Garland’s direction keeps the pacing tight without ever feeling rushed, the 108 minutes runtime is used efficiently — there is very little fat to trim, while Domhnall Gleeson and Alicia Vikander and Oscar Isaac bring enough conviction to make the smaller scenes land just as hard as the big ones, the production values, backed by DNA Films, hold up scene after scene.

The production spent around $15,000,000 to bring it to screen, and a worldwide haul of $36,869,414 suggests plenty of people agreed it was worth the price of admission.

Time has a way of sorting out which films from any given year actually stick, and this is one that has earned its place in regular rotation for people who already know it.

Coming out in 2015, it did not need a massive marketing campaign to find its audience, and that slow-burn word-of-mouth path is often a better predictor of staying power than an opening-weekend spike ever is.

For viewers deciding whether to press play, the short version is: this delivers on what it promises, does not overstay its 108 minutes, and rewards anyone willing to meet it halfway. Go in with reasonable expectations and let the film set its own pace.