Here you'll find a log of all the movies I watch, with a date and a rating. Click the dropdown to see a more detailed review. This is to take the place of Letterboxd for me, because I love to track things. Log is organized from oldest to most recent.
I'm... not sure why I watched this.
I definitely liked this better than Ex Machina. Watching it back-to-back was interesting; I might write a blog post about it later if I come up with more interesting things to say. Sophie Thatcher is incredible as always. I think last time I watched this movie I was too worried about trying to think of what it meant metaphorically rather than thinking of it as speculative fiction. As a spec-fic film it's pretty much everything Ex Machina wanted to be, with a better commentary on the autonomy and sexuality of it all. I loved the cinematography and the style decisions. I'm going to think on it and write more later.
Spoilers ahead. I actually had to stop watching this movie because there's an unbelievably graphic self-harm scene about an hour and a half in. (Plus, Kaia had fallen asleep anyways and I wanted to get them into bed.) The first hour and a half was interesting and maybe compelling, but it felt a little bit like misogynist torture porn. It was fun for me to think about it as a counterpart/predecessor to Companion (2025). Overall I would maybe rewatch with someone, especially to finish it, but it's not something I would watch on my own, as it's slow, tense, and triggering at times.
Update: I went back and finished watching this movie and I rerated it. (Originally it was three stars, I changed it to three and a half.) I liked it a lot better having finished it. I think the ending really made this movie. The first hour is pretty slow, but ending the movie with Ava's escape without Caleb (albeit with his help) was interesting. I'm interested in what the movie is trying to say about Caleb's role in it all--i.e. the viewer's role--and maybe his being complicit in Ava's treatment by only being interested in freeing her with the promise of a romantic relationship. I wonder if Caleb would be as willing to free Ava if she was a man, or if she was simply a gray box.
Two more things: One, I'm about to go back and watch Companion to compare to this. It's interesting that they have pretty similar concepts, but about a decade apart. I'm mostly curious to see how tech horror as a genre has changed over the years, as well as feminist horror. I think that the two movies have similar endings, if I recall correctly, so they'll be apt for comparison. Maybe I'll make a blog post about my thoughts. Two: There's a scene about an hour in where Caleb is hacking into Nathan's computer and it just shows basically Mathematica code for a quadratic sieve, which I thought was pretty funny. Nathan is supposed to be the smartest guy in the world, so the idea of him using an encryption system which can be broken with a quadratic sieve is pretty silly. Why wouldn't he use elliptic curve cryptography??? Why would he have Mathematica installed on his computer to make it so easy to hack into? Lots of very funny things here. Not important at all to the movie though. LOL.