Ex Machina, Clouds of Sils Maria: Electrifying automaton

Ex Machina proves to be a tantalising and stylish updating of some classic themes.

Alicia Vikander stars as A.I Ava in Ex Machina

Ex Machina, the anticipated debut feature by British novelist and screenwriter Alex Garland (who has worked more than once with Danny Boyle), proves to be a tantalising and stylish updating of some classic themes. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, whose obsessive determination to create an artificial man brought about his downfall, was just one of the early examples of science fiction’s obsessions with artificial intelligence. In the movies at any rate, these experiments almost always go wrong. Garland brings these themes up to date and adds more than just a dash of sexual tension to the mixture.

Domhnall Gleeson appears as Caleb, a computer genius in his mid-20s who works for the world’s largest internet provider. In the film’s terse opening sequence, Caleb’s fellow workers congratulate him for having won a competition to spend a week at the mountain retreat of the company’s boss, the suavely self-confident Nathan (Oscar Isaac).

To his surprise, Caleb discovers that Nathan is alone in the house — except for a Japanese servant (Sonoya Mizuno) and Ava (Alicia Vik­ander). Ava is Nathan’s most recent creation, a beautiful robot whose face and lower torso look human but whose midriff is transparent, revealing the wires and connections that drive her. Nathan informs Caleb that he is to conduct a daily interview with Ava to determine whether, in her mind processes, she is distinguishable from a human. During these seven sessions, Caleb discovers Ava has been programmed with sexual attributes — she’s able to experience sexual pleasure, Nathan blithely explains.

Garland, ably assisted by the fine photography by Rob Hardy (who also worked with Swedish actor Vikander on Testament of Youth) creates a strangely creepy environment and builds to a cracker of a climax. Much of the credit for the film’s success is due to Vikander, who proves with each new film that she’s an electrifying screen presence.

The familiar theme of the artificial intelligence that proves to be superior to the human who created it is given an added erotic twist in this satisfyingly creepy exercise in contemporary sci-fi, and Garland has made an impressive leap from writing to directing with a film that, despite employing a familiar formula, manages to spring a few tasty surprises.

The plot of the new film by Olivier Assayas, Clouds of Sils Maria, has some similarities to that of the recent David Cronenberg film Maps to the Stars. Both are behind-the-scenes examinations into the insecurities of actors, and both involve an ageing female star attempting to revisit a seminal early role in which she had played the ingenue while now resigned to be cast as the older woman. The plots may be similar but the approach is very different. While Cronenberg favoured a dark, heightened and wickedly funny approach, Assayas — one of the best French directors of his generation — is attempting something rather more subtle and ultimately disturbing.

The film opens with an electrifying sequence on a train travelling between Paris and Zurich. On board are Maria Enders (Juliette Binoche), a celebrated actress, and her personal assistant, Valentine (Kristen Stewart), Val for short. Assayas deftly sketches in the relationship between these two. Maria is 40-ish, Val almost half her age. Maria is talented, precocious, insecure, neurotic, needy; Val looks after every detail in her employer’s private and public life; she’s more than a young woman in an important and demanding job — she’s a friend, mother, therapist and potentially even lover. Both actresses are wonderful in these roles. We have come to expect great performances from Bin­oche, but Stewart is a revelation who demonstrates that, if she wants to, she can leave stuff like the Twilight franchise far behind her and tackle much more challenging roles.

The women are making the trip so Maria can accept a lifetime achievement award on behalf of celebrated playwright Wilhelm Melchior. More than 20 years earlier, when she was 18, Maria had played a key role in a film version of Maloja Snake, one of Melchior’s plays in which she had played the young assistant to a middle-aged businesswoman, a relationship with lesbian undertones. The play and film (which sound vaguely similar to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant but also carry hints of Ingmar Bergman) had been very successful. Maria has been approached to star in a remake in which, naturally, she’ll play the older woman, so she has more than one reason to reunite with Melchior. However, before they even leave the train Val receives a message saying the playwright is dead. When the women arrive at his mountain hideaway his widow (Angela Winkler) suggests that he killed himself.

With Val always at her side, Maria succeeds in avoiding her former co-star, Henryk Wald (Hanns Zischler), whom she loathes, and agrees to the casting of up-and-coming Hollywood star Jo-Ann Ellis (Chloe Grace Moretz) as the younger woman. Val is delighted at this piece of casting because the youthful Jo-Ann is, she claims, her favourite actress; to Maria’s bemusement, her assistant praises the “truth and power” of Jo-Ann’s performance in a recent ­superhero movie. (Moretz has appeared in the Kick-Ass franchise as well as an assortment of minor horror films.) In an amusing in-joke, Assayas includes a scene in which Jo-Ann takes part in a television interview in which she discusses being fired from a remake of 1950s sci-fi classic Forbidden Planet.

The bulk of the drama unfolds in the dead playwright’s home, lent to Maria by his widow, where Val helps Maria learn the screenplay, in the process taking the role of the character Maria had played herself long ago.

These elements — generational envy, professional insecurity, power and its abuse, sexual tension — are all combined to make a thoroughly absorbing and at times deeply mysterious film. The title refers to a spectacular cloud formation that sometimes fills the Sils Maria valley and that is known as “the snake”. Assayas, a dedicated film buff, includes an excerpt from a 1924 silent film, The Phenomenon of the Clouds of Maloja, which was the work of the legendary Arnold Fanck who was famous for his “mountain” films.

Clouds of Sils Maria is beautifully acted and never less than interesting, but it is also challengingly mysterious. An unexplained late plot development leaves a large hole in the drama and though there are hints as to the cause of the mystery the result is that the film concludes on a strangely ambiguous note. This may bother some viewers more than others, but even taking into account this reservation the film seems to me to be one of the better recent French releases and worthy of serious attention.

Ex-Machina (MA15+) 4 stars

National release

Clouds of Sils Maria (MA15+) 4 stars

Limited release