Having penned some of the most memorable movies in recent years, Alex Garland is finally going behind the camera this year for the first time, bringing us a psychological thriller in the form of Ex Machina.
Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac, and Alicia Vikander star in the leading trio, and with Vikander starring as a beautiful robot, you can be sure this is going to be an interesting one, and it should be a lot of fun when it lands. And whilst we await a glimpse at Vikander herself in the movie, the first still has now been released, teasing a look at Gleeson and Isaac, and what could well be some of the inner workings of Vikander’s robot, Ava.
Caleb, a 24 year old coder at the world’s largest internet company, wins a competition to spend a week at a private mountain retreat belonging to Nathan, the reclusive CEO of the company. But when Caleb arrives at the remote location he finds that he will have to participate in a strange and fascinating experiment in which he must interact with the world’s first true artificial intelligence, housed in the body of a beautiful robot girl.
Garland (Dredd, 28 Days Later…) is directing from his own script, with Garland’s past collaborators Allon Reich (Dredd) and Andrew Macdonald (28 Days Later…) producing alongside executive producers Scott Rudin (No Country for Old Men) and Tessa Ross (12 Years a Slave).
No word yet on exactly when or where we can look forward to seeing Ex Machina this year, but a bow on the festival circuit certainly wouldn’t be amiss. A number of Garland’s projects have debuted at the likes of TIFF and Telluride, and starting of his directorial career with a film like this at somewhere like Toronto seems like a perfect fit. Whilst we eagerly await the first, likely teaser, trailer, here’s the first-look image, which you can click through to enlarge.
