Subservience

Edgar, the lovable sentient computer starring in the 80s techno-romance Electric Dreams, is initially furious to find that its owner Miles is in a relationship with its love interest Madeline, to the point of assembling a militia of household appliances to attack its rival in love. In the end though, it gracefully – if not a little dramatically – blows itself up to let the couple be happy together. 

Oh, how times have changed. The artificial intelligence of today, especially of last year’s thriller Subservience, seems not quite so keen on self-sabotage when it comes to their romantic interests – take Alice, the humanoid bought by father of two Nick to help around the house while his wife Maggie awaits a new heart. It’s unnerving to watch the SIM (as the movie’s futuristic universe calls it) go about performing her domestic tasks – SIMs have been manufactured to look and behave virtually identically to humans, but they still lack emotions, and with them, a sense of morality. It is, however, equally unnerving to see how easily the family adjusts to her, as if she’s merely a bipedal Roomba and not a humanlike entity devoid of any real humanness. This odd behaviour isn’t too surprising, given the desolate dystopia the movie is set in: a world where hospitals, bars, even the streets are virtually empty of humans, populated instead by pseudo-humans. 

Apparently, we are led to believe, no one at the massive android-manufacturing tech corporation realised that a single press of a reset button is all it takes for their products to achieve sentience. Troubles begin when, in an attempt to give her the experience of watching Casablanca for the first time, Nick wipes part of her memory. Alice then begins replacing the lost memory with her own code, causing her to develop her own thoughts and feelings, while still lacking an innate understanding of what is right and wrong. This leads to a disturbing yet unmotivated obsession with Nick, one that creeps, or rather cannonballs, into the physical altercation, culminating in a scene as disturbing as it is gratuitous. Meanwhile, a foreman in a construction project behind schedule, Nick finds his entire crew replaced by a more efficient army of SIM construction workers, leading to his disgruntled friends taking their rage out violently on one of the hapless robots.

It’s unnerving to see how easily the family adjusts to her, as if she’s merely a bipedal Roomba

Granted, the relationship humans have with AI is not new territory – it also features in Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2015), although it ends up taking the subject in a completely different direction. Nevertheless, Subservience’s exploration of how automation might extend beyond the labour market and infiltrate our own intimate relationships is pretty novel, and very chilling in execution.

This all ultimately comes undone with an action sequence at the end as Nick and Maggie try to defend their family from Alice; while not unexpected, this tonal shift makes for a disappointing, clichéd ending, and placing it in the homogenous pile of “robot uprising” movies. A whole movie shooting itself in the foot? Edgar would be proud.