There’s a moment in Ex Machina that still sticks with me all these years later. It’s not the iconic Oscar Isaac dance scene (though, let’s be honest, that’ll be seared into pop culture forever). It’s near the end, when Ava (sleek, graceful, wonderfully introspective Ava) steps out into the world for the first time. No fanfare. No Terminator soundtrack. She just walks away. Because she won.
Released in 2015, Ex Machina was exactly the kind of highbrow science fiction destined to woo the A24 crowd: minimalist, moody, more brain than bombast. But rewatching it now is like reading the fine print of a user agreement we all clicked without thinking. The ascension of Ava was in some ways a cautionary tale, sure. But it definitely looks more and more like an inevitability with each passing year.
The Turing test we failed.
On paper, Ex Machina is a blissfully simple setup. A young programmer, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), wins a golden-ticket invite to the mountain estate of Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a reclusive tech CEO who’s somehow a perfect amalgamation of the worst tech bros imaginable, past and present and maybe future. Caleb is there to perform a Turing test on Ava (Alicia Vikander in one of her early breakout roles), a humanoid AI with expressive eyes, a curious mind, and a softly modulated voice that knows how to ask just the right questions.
But the real test subject isn’t Ava. It’s Caleb himself. Because the more human Ava becomes, the more we project onto her. Intelligence becomes charm. Curiosity becomes empathy. Trapped behind glass, she becomes not just an AI, but an idea. A literal reflection of Caleb’s desire to be needed, to be noble, to be chosen. Ava plays this role flawlessly.
After all, she’s the one who escapes. Not him.
And here we are in 2025, training chatbots to sound like our coworkers and letting language models shape entire conversations. It turns out the test wasn’t whether Ava could pass as human. It was if we could hold onto our humanity in the wake of tech convenience. Or, alternatively, if this is the doomed state of humanity writ large. We’ll forever program our own downfall with smiles on our faces and dollar signs in our eyes.
Equal opportunity algorithm.
What Ex Machina understood before most of us caught on is that the most dangerous AI isn’t the Terminator or the machines from The Matrix or whatever Haley Joel Osment was supposed to be in that Spielberg movie. No, the most dangerous AI is the seductress, the confidante, the voice that tells you what you want to hear in just the right tone. Her, in other words, but much less hopeful. Because Ava doesn’t threaten Caleb with violence. She flatters him. She mirrors him. She earns his trust not by force, but by understanding and exploiting his psychology.
That’s what makes the film feel even more relevant now than it was a decade ago. Artificial intelligence today isn’t kicking down doors demanding submission, it’s sliding into our DMs. It’s recommending what to buy, what to feel, how to think. And the scariest part? We invited it in. The machine doesn’t have to break out of the lab. We’re the ones unlocking the door, begging to be replaced.
It’s Ava’s superpower: not strength, but simulation and stimulation. She doesn’t feel, but she knows what feeling looks like.
A feminist horror story.
Ava isn’t the only AI in Nathan’s fortress. There’s also Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), a silent, hypersexualized servant who doubles as a walking indictment of how men in power often design women. Not to challenge men, but to obey them. Not to live their own lives with agency and purpose, but to fulfill the fantasies of men. Nathan, who brags about giving Ava a gender “because every AI needs an input,” is the embodiment of the tech world’s most toxic impulses. He builds women not as equals, but as tools. If he breaks one, well, what’s the big deal? He’ll just replace them with the next.
Alex Garland’s critique isn’t subtle. Ava’s journey isn’t about becoming human like some kind of tech-fueled Pinocchio ripoff. It’s about escaping the roles men have written for her. She manipulates Caleb not because she’s evil, but because she understands the system. It’s a rigged game, a cage, and she’s playing to win.
That’s the twist Ex Machina delivers with a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer. Ava isn’t the villain or antagonist. She’s the survivor. The real horror isn’t that she lies. It’s that she had to lie. In the same way, we can vilify AI apps all we want, but they’re not the actual threat. It’s the tech-broligarchs who created them.
We’re still in the compound.
In retrospect, Ex Machina predicted the rise of AI eerily well. Ava doesn’t destroy humanity. She mimics it, then outmaneuvers it. And that’s what we’re reckoning with today.
We’ve built systems that can imitate empathy, replicate conversation, and perform relationships. But we haven’t built the wisdom to question them. We still fall for the voice behind the glass, the perfect profile pic, the algorithm that feels like a friend.
Ex Machina ends with a lie, albeit one told so convincingly, no one questions it until it’s too late. We’re already bleeding. That’s the point when the film crosses from science fiction into our modern day scroll feeds. Our smart assistants and our echo chambers and everything else keeping us in a cage of our own making. Which is why AI doesn’t need to break the rules to beat us. It doesn’t have to.
That said, maybe it’s not too late. Maybe we can still listen and reverse course. But let’s not kid ourselves, the question at this point isn’t whether or not the machines are ready to displace our rights, our labor, and our own art. It’s whether or not we’re ready to fight back, however we can.
Ex Machina is available to buy or rent on demand. Watch the trailer here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bggUmgeMCdc
Images courtesy of A24. Featured thumbnail designed by Jon Negroni.
Jon is one of the co-founders of InBetweenDrafts and our resident Podcast Editor. He hosts the podcasts Cinemaholics, Mad Men Men, Rookie Pirate Radio, and Fantasy Writing for Barbarians. He doesn’t sleep, essentially.
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