It seems like a week can't go by in 2015 with a new film starring Alicia Vikander being released. The Swedish actress has had a meteoric rise after key roles in off-kilter period pieces Anna Karenina and A Royal Affair, but this year she's become unavoidable - at one point she had three separate films in cinemas at once. But while the likes of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and The Danish Girl will no doubt be the biggest boost to her career, possibly offering up a box office smash and Academy attention respectively, it's unlikely that she's going to top her performance in Ex Machina. Alex Garland's sci-fi is incredibly modern in its trappings, pushing age-old AI theories like the Turing Test into a high-tech casing, but with its tiny cast and singular location, it's not dissimilar to the cerebral genre offerings of the seventies. As thus, while Domhnall Gleeson and Oscar Isaac get ample opportunity to explore human trickery, the real focus is Ava, Vikander's ground-breaking artificial intelligence, which requires the actress to play a robot that can act human pretending to have actually developed its humanity. Or perhaps the other way round. The film is, essentially, an elaborate, purposely flawed Turing test, at first asking the audience to assess Ava's humanity before jumping the gun and providing its own solution, making her physically indistinguishable from a real person.
