20 Best Sci-Fi Films Of The 21st Century

Ex Machina is another one of those movies that does an awful lot with very little. Aside from an expensive looking tracking shot at the start, Ex Machina takes place solely in a single location. The location in question being a bunker owned by an eccentric billionaire tech mogul. Because when has that ever ended super weirdly?

Ex Machina boasts some astonishing performances throughout. Domnhall Gleeson plays Caleb with adequate nerves and a certain sadness at his core. He's every bit the everyman. Alicia Vikander plays AI Ava brilliantly, with a childlike curiosity, selling the naive nature of Ava with every line.

But the highest honour goes to Oscar Isaac as Nathan Bateman, the reclusive CEO Caleb works for. Isaac manages to make Nathan seem both welcoming and profoundly unsettling, with his true intentions never seeming to be on show. Nathan is a creep through and through, and often seems far less human than even Ava herself.

Ex Machina is both a solid exploration of the ethics of AI as well as a tense depiction of one man's descent into insanity as he questions his own humanity and identity in relation to the machine he can't help but grow ever closer to.