I was an unabashed fan of S.K. Dale’s directorial debut Till Death (not to be mistaken with Til’ Death Do Us Part, of which I was not a fan). Dale’s taut direction and high-concept thrills were the perfect match for star Megan Fox’s grounded, pissed-off presence. Floundering the past few years in direct-to-video schlock (see: 2020’s Lion horror Rogue), Till Death was a return to form, a bloody reminder that Fox’s talent transcends the tabloid constraints that inexorably follow her. S.K. Dale’s Subservience is another go at the genre successes of his first collaboration with Fox. This time, the shackles are broken, and Fox is given the opportunity to lean into Skynet-lite killer synthetic trappings.
Maggie (Madeline Zima, The Collector) is ill and needs a heart transplant. Beleaguered dad and construction worker, Nick (Michele Morrone, whose performance amounts to being Hot), needs help around the house, so he incredulously enlists the aid of Alice (Megan Fox), a synthetic fembot that, well, looks exactly like Megan Fox. These bots, sold by Kobol Industries, are proficient in the three Cs: cooking, cleaning, and childcare. Better still (because this has never gone wrong before), the more they learn, the better they’ll be able to serve.
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Subservience plays its tired conceit best when it leans into its pulpy erotic thriller origins. Dale generates plenty of mileage from the conspicuous, burgeoning sexual interplay between Nick and Alex, but unlike something like, say, Fatal Attraction or Body Double, Subservience never solidifies the peripheral sadomasochistic roots its premise so clearly begs for.
Nick is bad. An ostensibly nice, blue-collar worker whose stress all but demands he tie himself up to sleep with his family’s robotic nanny. It’s for his own good, you see. He’s been under a lot of stress (his hospitalized wife, certainly under more stress of her own, doesn’t matter). Megan Fox wears Skims circa 2034 under all her outfits because of course the synthetic housemaid does. This is the future, after all.
Broad brushstrokes are made toward the encroaching threat of automation and artificial intelligence, principally as it relates to Nick’s contracting jobs and his employers’ insistence the human staff is replaced with synths. Subservience contends it’s cheaper that way, though given the central family’s dire financial straits, it’s never really clear how they managed to afford their own model in the first place. These highly intelligent synthetics could run for $1,000 or $100,000 and nothing in Subservience makes the answer clear.
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Fox, at least, has fun in the role, even if the slow, disciplined descent she exhibited in Till Death is absent here. She’s outwardly menacing from the start, despondently staring at Nick from a distance, stripping down in the middle of the home long before she’s even been reset (the ostensible cause of her subsequent vie for autonomy).
Tonally, Subservience is all over the place, treading down pretty heavy thematic paths—bereavement, death by suicide—before diverting back to a synthetic with acrylic nails trying to drown a baby while husband and wife argue over whether sex with a fembot is the same as using a vibrator.
Subservience could be camp, and the movie might work better as camp, if not for all the glossy, Very Serious gestures toward Living in a Society. The automation of childcare, interstices with healthcare—all of it is for naught. At its core, Subservience is an updated Fatal Attraction for a new age. A man makes a mistake, his wife forgives him, and the other woman is rendered homicidal as a result.
It’s a little problematic, a little messy, and really doesn’t have much to say. Subservience is intermittently fun, and intermittently violent, especially as it careens toward a small-scale I, Robot conclusion. As a whole, however, it’s not really worth being subservient to. Both Dale and Fox have done much better working together before. Go check that out. Subservience might make a nice bookend, but it certainly doesn’t make an impression.
Subservience releases September 13.
