Domhnall Gleeson (son of Brendan) plays Caleb Smith, both an every man and a tech genius, who is not so randomly selected at random as the winner of a weeks vacation with his world famous celebra-boss Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac) at his isolated estate in what looks like maybe Canada or Alaska. It's not really a traditional vacation of course, Nathan has selected Caleb to test if the state of the art, top secret android he built passes the Turing test, a theoretical behavior standard meant to determine if propertied artificial intelligence is really genuinely capable of thought and consciousness, or is just imitating those quality's. Nathan's android is named Ava (Alicia Vikander with CGI trimmings), she's lovely and charming, but what is really going behind her human like face and in inside her cybernetic brain.
The story is really fairly conventional for sci-fi, we've seen it before in everything from The Bicentennial Man to West World, but its expertly and quite moodily handled here. I feel like I should have seem more of what was coming before I did, I too was distracted by the lovely magicians assistant, to borrow a metaphor from the film, and so interested in what was happing on screen that I never got around to projecting it forward to its likely ending. Special notice must go to Oscar Isaac's performance as Bateman, he is one of those phenomenal genius, business guru types, who is so well respected, rich, and all around successful that he has come to relate to lesser intellects with a detachment that echoes that of the artificial intellects he seeks to create. ***1/2
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