The early '70s gave us a wave of dystopian sci-fi thrillers in which Artificial Intelligence turns against its human masters. Movies like Colossus: The Forbin Project, Westworld and Demon Seed saw super-computers, theme park robots and smart homes, all of which were supposed to make our lives better, reveal their dark sides. We now live in a world where the concerns of those '70s thrillers are rapidly becoming a reality, and yet our current wave of AI thrillers feel arguably less realistic than their 50-year-old forebears. Maybe it's because the latest AI thrillers simply graft their sci-fi narratives onto old formats. Most of them (M3GAN, T.I.M., AfrAId) are simply updates of "evil nanny" thrillers, where initially Mary Poppins-like home helpers turn out to be psychos (The Nanny, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and numerous made for TV thrillers). That's the case once again with Subservience, though this one adds an element of sleaze, making it an erotic robotic thriller if you will.
The mechanical nanny surrogate here is Alice (Megan Fox), part of a line of lifelike AI home-helpers. Where other recent AI thrillers have been set in the very near future, featuring prototypes that inevitably go wrong, Subservience is set at a point in the future where AI and androids have already become an established part of life. If you go to a hospital the surgery will be performed by lifelike robots, and if you go to a pub cyborgs will take your orders and serve your drinks. Oddly enough, in this future world they haven't yet figured out how to create a functioning artificial heart, so if you need a new heart you still have to wait for an old-fashioned transplant.
That's the situation Maggie (Madeline Zima) finds herself in when she suffers a heart attack. With Maggie confined to a hospital bed until a donor can be found, her husband Nick (Michele Morrone) decides to purchase an AI home helper to help with household chores and look after their young kids. There are two models available - one based on old English butlers and one that resembles a hot young woman. It's no surprise that Nick opts for one that looks like Megan Fox. His daughter names the android "Alice" after Alice in Wonderland, but I like to think the movie is nodding to The Brady Bunch with this moniker.
If you've seen any evil nanny movies you know how this plays out. Alice is initially a godsend, taking a weight off Nick's shoulders and even saving his daughter Isla (Matilda Firth) from a fall when she tries to steal some cookies from a high shelf. But Alice is part of a line of cyborgs programmed to replicate human emotions, and she's also suspiciously equipped with sex organs, so she begins to get hot and bothered for the hunky Nick. Likewise, Nick can't help admiring the well-sculpted curves of this automaton's alluring chassis, and it's not long before man and machine are getting it on.
As is always the case with the men in erotic thrillers, Nick immediately claims he made a mistake and it must never happen again. Having had a taste of that which sets animals apart from androids however, Alice isn't taking no for an answer, and things get decidedly complicated when Maggie eventually returns home from hospital and is seen as a threat to Alice.
I don't mean to sound cruel, but in playing a machine struggling to process human emotion, Fox might have just found the role for which she's long been destined. The actress's bouts of plastic surgery have given her an artificial appearance that works perfectly for Alice, and she's eerily good at pulling off the droid's creepy blank face. The movie generates humour from Fox's mechanical line deliveries as Alice betrays a lack of human tact. But Fox also makes Alice sympathetic as the android struggles to understand how humans can be so illogical when it comes to our ever-conflicting emotions.
It's the latter aspect that makes Subservience a little more nuanced than most thrillers that have exploited our fears of AI. The film is keen to point out that AI is a product of humanity, that it has no mind or emotions of its own, that it simply reflects the best and (terrifyingly) the worst of us. When Nick rants about some of his colleagues being replaced by AI construction workers, Alice reminds him that he's similarly guilty of purchasing a mechanical home helper rather than hiring a human for the role. One of the things that makes us most uncomfortable about AI is that we fear it's going to eventually make hypocrites of us all as we weigh up the balance between our ethics and our personal convenience.
Such observations are largely buried in a formulaic fuckdoll-fights-back thriller however. Subservience's plot beats are overly familiar as it drapes a sci-fi shawl around erotic thriller shoulders. But there's some fun to be had in seeing played-out thriller tropes rejigged in this way, and the movie does a convincing job of portraying its near-future world on a relatively low budget. It's Fox's sexy and scary performance as a not-quite-woman scorned that will draw in fans of the erotic thriller, a maligned sub-genre currently undergoing a nostalgic re-evaluation in our current era of sexless cinema.
Directed by: S.K. Dale
Starring: Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima
