Ex Machina

A closer look at the story

Ex Machina begins with a surprise prize for Caleb, a programmer at a major internet company. He wins an internal contest, and his reward is a week as the guest of Nathan, the company's reclusive chief executive, at his isolated home in the mountains. Once he arrives, however, Caleb discovers that the visit is no ordinary holiday. Nathan wants him to take part in an experiment that is as unsettling as it is fascinating: Caleb is to interact with Ava, the first genuine artificial intelligence, whose mind lives inside the body of a robot. The film builds on the idea behind the Turing test, the question of whether conversation alone can reveal if a machine is really thinking. Alex Garland wrote and directed this 108-minute science-fiction drama from 2015, a British-American production. Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, Alicia Vikander plays Ava and Oscar Isaac plays Nathan, with Sonoya Mizuno and Corey Johnson also in the cast.