We are put right into the seat of the tension of the characters from the very first moments of the film. A camera sees a house in the distance and we sit in the street. A girl exits the home and begins running to the right, as Disasterpiece's dark, synth-heavy score purrs in the background. The camera follows her in one slow, deliberate movment, turning as if on a carosel. She stops in the middle of the street and stares back at the home, fear obvious on her face. She then runs further to the right and back around to the house and then inside. The carosel the camera is on continues. She exits the house again with keys, jumps into what can only be her father's car, and speeds off, the camera pursuing slowly. Disasterpiece's score goes from a purr to a roar. Next, we see her sitting on a beach, back to the water, and illuminated by the headlights of the car. She's talking to her father on the phone, appologising for making various mistakes. We cut to her P.O.V. and we can see the woods near the beach illuminated with red light by the break lights on the car. The score begins to pound and knock, growing in volume until near bursting. Just before it becomes too much, we cut to the same girl in the daytime on the same beach, but she is pale and very dead. She lies upon her back, legs snapped so severely that the bone is exposed.
This sets us up for the rest of the film. The camera serves to put us in the seat of the specter as well as the characters, while also functioning to provide tension. Slow pans to suggest the specter is moving, showing the specter just out of sight of the characters but completely in sight of the audience, and providing just enough information at any given moment to open the audience up to wild speculation of what will happen next. IT FOLLOWS serves as a master class in modern suspense and horror.
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EX MACHINA is a film comprised of questions, and it isn't entirely keen on answering them.
Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, an employee of the world's largest tech company, who is chosen to fly to the island of the company's CEO. While he thinks he is merely there as a sort of vacation, the CEO, Nathan (Oscar Issac) reveals that Caleb is actually there to perform a modified Turing Test on an A.I. he's been working on. That A.I. is given the name Ava, and her performance by Alicia Vikander is the focal point of this film.
Vikander finds a way to imbue Ava with so much: joy, sensuality, fear, power, and some combination of them all. It's this very performance which fuels the main questions it asks of the viewer, namely "Who is the 'good person' in this film?" Since Caleb is the protagonist, wer're inclined to empathaize with him and his perspective, but there is a strong reading that suggest that he may not as pure as he seems. Often we see full-body reflections of the characters upon glass surfaces, and that happens enough that I think there is thematic meaning to it.
Every character has a duality to them. Nathan claims to want to create the latest form of A.I. but, by doing so, reveals his toxic view of women, as he makes every model of the A.I. as a conventionally attractive woman that he deactiviates when they deviate from what he wants and he turns them into objects of his pleasure. Caleb, our protagonist, seems to be a "good person" who takes issue with many of the things Nathan does...but remains somwhat neutral (which is totally a form of action) except in the case of Ava. Through a dream sequence, we see that he sees himself and Ava together romantically, even though he has only known her for less than a week, and has spoken to her less than five times. Even more, Ava is a composite of his internet search history, so she's literally a projection of his desires. In his desire to save her, he strokes his ego, especially since he doesn't have the same desire to save the other A.I. that also exists. Finally, with Ava, we have a wholly different perspective. While Nathan and Caleb had their own projections they put upon Ava, she has one desire: freedom. Nathan keeps her in a litteral box, and Caleb only sees her personhood within the context of a romantic relationship, so her rebellion and the means through which she does it makes complete sense to me.
Is what she does at the end totally warranted? Does Caleb deserve what happened? Were there an abundance of similarities between Caleb and Nathan that Caleb subtly accepts? The film doesn't make any of it too clear, and I'm inclined to think that your answer to these questions says more about yourself than the film.
