Every Friday Chris hand-selects a streaming recommendation for your weekend.
This Friday’s Featured Flick
Ex Machina on Amazon Prime
(don’t watch) THE TRAILER
THE DETAILS
DIRECTOR: Alex Garland
WRITER: Alex Garland
CAST: Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, Alicia Vikander, Sonoya Mizuno
GENRE: Sci-Fi, Slow-Burn Suspense
RUNTIME: 108 min
YEAR: 2015
THE PLOT (via Letterboxd)
Caleb, a 24 year old coder at the world’s largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world’s first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl.
THE REASON
Writer/director Alex Garland delicately assembled one of the finest and most unsettling films I’ve seen all year. Ex Machina is the type of suspense picture that begs you to revisit it, because knowing the ultimate outcome only makes the story more complex. This isn’t the type of movie culminates in a big Verbal-Kint-style reveal at the end. No puzzle pieces are put into place. No perspective is objectively correct. Each of the three main characters could just as easily be construed as the story’s the hero as they could its villain.
If this all sounds a little too heavy for you perhaps these GIFs I made of Oscar Isaac dancing in the film will persuade you to give it a whirl:
Ex Machina is streaming now on Amazon Prime.
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