Ex Machina

Alex Garland had been a novelist, with The Beach, and a screenwriter, with 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Never Let Me Go and Dredd, before he directed anything. Ex Machina, his debut behind the camera, premiered at BFI Southbank in December 2014 and reached British cinemas through Universal in January 2015; A24 took it in the United States. Made for around fifteen million dollars, it grossed more than twice that and won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, with Garland nominated for Best Original Screenplay.

The setup is a chamber piece. Domhnall Gleeson's Caleb, a programmer, is flown to the isolated research compound of his employer, Nathan, played by Oscar Isaac as a bearded, hard-drinking tech sovereign, and asked to administer a Turing test to Ava, the machine Nathan has made. Alicia Vikander plays Ava with a dancer's precision. Garland shot for four weeks at Pinewood and two at the Juvet Landscape Hotel in Norway's Valldalen, lighting the sets with thousands of tungsten bulbs to avoid science fiction's usual fluorescent chill. Ava's body was achieved without greenscreen, Vikander's costume digitally carved away across some 800 effects shots by DNEG. Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow wrote the score.

The film swept the British Independent Film Awards, taking Best British Independent Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay, and earned five BAFTA nominations. Writers Guild members later placed the script among the 101 greatest screenplays of the century so far. It remains the most lucid screen treatment of machine consciousness, a film of ideas that plays as a thriller.