Not very long ago, robots and AIs, automatons and droids — either as friendly or malignant entities — belonged to a far unknown future (remember when the old sci-fi flicks often announced a 2000-ish year as a distant time via a title card?), and were nothing more than futuristic fantasies or technophobic prophecies. But it’s obvious that with the everyday march of technological advance, some of these futuristic sci-fi reveries are now nothing less than contemporary. Into this conversation comes S.K. Dale’s sophomore feature Subservience (seeing Dale team up once again with his Till Death’s lead Megan Fox), which is first and foremost about very coeval concerns regarding the current state of mankind vs. AI, filled with head-scratching dilemmas of fright (for our species’ employment) and allure (of the benevolence of comfort). The film — shot in Sofia, Bulgaria, standing in for a Midwestern American city — opens with Nick (Michele Morrone), a loving husband and devoted father who, after his better half Maggie (Madeline Zima) is hospitalized due to a weak heart and left waiting for a transplant, visits at a cutting-edge technology expo and is convinced, partially by his young daughter Isla (Matilda Firth), to purchase a domestic-service fembot (Fox) to look after the home and children (including toddler Max) during mom’s absence. But as Dale’s patiently slow camerawork along with Jed Palmer’s eerily ambient soundtrack emphasizes from the very beginning, this seductively beautiful AI (marketed as a way to “simplify your life,” or as she explains later, to “protect her primary user”) will gradually send this cozy and familial household sideways.
The ultra-sophisticated lifelike nanny, named Alice after Isla’s favorite book, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, is specifically designed to mimic human emotions, but soon not only shifts from obedience and kindness to dominance and revolt, but most importantly, develops feelings of obsessive sexual attraction for Nick and subsequent loathing toward Maggie and the children. This, of course, puts the family in genuine life-threatening jeopardy, all while Nick also finds himself having to deal with upcoming work-related struggles as a construction foreman when a decision is made to replace many of the workers with a group of hi-tech SIMs. In the details, this can all feel like an overly familiar strain of sci-fi thriller shenanigans, and the narrative convolutions and predictable conflicts can begin to wear on viewers’ intrigue. But what keeps Dale’s dystopic and slow-burn blend of sci-fi/horror at the level of a grippingly sinister and atmospheric high-concept work — one which playfully never shies away from some pulpy, steamy eroticism and R-rated graphic gore — is its control in shaping a constant crawling suspension beneath the film’s glossy images. It works to keep viewers continuously curious throughout, not with the question of “what will happen,” but rather with how things will happen. Although the actors’ performances — especially Morrone, who feels a bit like a cardboard Oscar Isaac here — are rather stiff, it’s at least partially explicable within the film’s technetronic framework of roboticism. Within that context, Fox is particularly impressive, pushing her familiar screen persona of a drop-dead gorgeous ice queen into the realm of expressionless android femme fatale, and her performance does much of the heavy lifting here. At its heart, Subservience’s economical yet well-executed production (with a few sequences of spectacular VFX) and bold eclectic approach — for example, despite the general concept being reminiscent of recent crazed-robot films such as M3GAN, the climatic hospital scene much more readily evokes T2 — pleasantly recalls the entertaining and adrenaline-filled simplicities of campy ’80s and ’90s DTV B-movies. Indeed, it’s these kinds of films that are desperately needed within our present cinematic landscape: specifically, movies less reminiscent of AI replication, less driven by algorithm, and blessed with all the flaws, freedom, and imagination of (human) artist-driven ingenuity.
DIRECTOR: S.K. Dale; CAST: Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima, Kate Nichols; DISTRIBUTOR: XYZ Films; IN THEATERS: September 13; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 35 min.
