Release date: TBC Whether with original scripts like 28 Days Later or Sunshine, or book adaptations like Never Let Me Go and Dredd, Alex Garland has proved himself one of the most consistently engaging and intelligent writers of sci-fi on film, although none of the latter three received the level of audience attention they deserved. After frequent collaborations with Danny Boyle, Garland is now stepping behind the camera himself. Described as an indie psychological thriller, Ex Machina is a low budget three-hander in which a young computer programmer is hand-picked by his reclusive billionaire boss to spend a week at his remote estate in which he finds out he must participate in strange experiments involving the wealthy genius' latest invention: a true artificial intelligence in the form of a female robot. Little more is known about the film than this, but Garland has shown in the past that he has the ability to marry a story about what makes us human with a tightly paced thriller. In that he'll be helped by a cast that are so hot right now. Ex Machina's three leads are all talented actors and rising stars on the cusp of big things: Domnhall Gleeson (About Time), Oscar Isaac (Inside Llewyn Davis) and Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair). Gleeson and Vikander appeared as Levin and Kitty, the genuinely romantic couple in Anna Karenina, so already have good chemistry for a film that looks like being a twisted technological love triangle.
