There's something familiar about SK Dale's latest film, Subservience.
Starring horror queen Megan Fox, it resurrects the well-worn trope of the dangers of AI, following in the footsteps of those before it — most notably, M3GAN.
Fast facts about Subservience
What: Yet another tale about how sentient robots will ruin our lives.
Director: SK Dale
Starring: Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima, Matilda Firth.
When: Streaming on Apple TV+ now.
Likely to make you feel: Simultaneously icky and bored.
Nick (Michele Morrone, 365 Days) is at a robot expo in search of assistance on the domestic front, following his wife Maggie's (Madeleine Zima) admission to hospital where she awaits heart surgery. His eldest child Isla (Matilda Firth) picks out an improbably attractive robot, christening her Alice (Megan Fox) after her favourite book, Alice in Wonderland.
Alice slots into the household seamlessly, performing the drudgery of domestic chores with the astounding efficiency only a robot can muster. Much like M3GAN's sole purpose was to do everything in her power to serve the perceived interests of her primary user, Alice is hard-wired to protect and nurture Nick.
Even if that means role-playing as his wife and calibrating the needs of the household according to his blood pressure and heart rate, which spike in the event of any stressors — an unfortunately common occurrence when you have two young children and a severely ill wife.
When Nick unknowingly changes Alice's settings, launching a domino-like chain of calamitous events, his family find themselves in mortal peril.
"We had a fine line between playing this robotic inhuman character but also needing enough emotion that when we get to more intimate scenes, the audience buys it," director SK Dale told Screen Rant about creating the character Alice. (Supplied: Rialto)
Mirroring the collective anxieties of society at large, Hollywood has been fixated on the existential threat of robots and AI for a while. There was Alex Garland's 2014 film Ex Machina, and even Stanley Kubrick's seminal 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), one of the earliest depictions of AI turning against humans.
Subservience lacks the panache and tongue-in-cheek fit of its forebears, but it does throw up some interesting moral questions about the encroachment of AI on our lives.
AI's threat to labour and employment
Unlike many other AI films, the domestic realm is not the only space in which AI and robots — known as "sims" in Subservience — reign supreme.
They impinge on every facet of Nick's life: from his workplace, where he's the only one to retain his job as foreman on a building site after all his construction colleagues are replaced by robots; to the hospital where Maggie is being treated, where an overwhelming majority of the nurses, doctors and workers are robots. Even the bars that Nick frequents are tended by robots.
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The personal ramifications of this are charted in a clumsy side plot involving Nick's former colleague, Monty, one of the construction workers to have lost his job. On a broader level, however, there is scant justification for how bots have infiltrated industries as disparate as hospitality and medicine, and why the construction industry is the last bastion of a human-powered workforce.
It's an interesting perspective, though; a film more intent on effective world-building could've commented on how the dominance of AI isn't confined to a single industry, what this means for swathes of people who are presumably now jobless, and the social unrest that would ensue from a large-scale industrial phenomenon like this.
Can AI give consent?
Michele Morrone, whose only contribution to the film is Being Hot, struggles to display the emotional range (however scant) required for the role.
His two modes are: tending to his car like a 'real man', and lusting after Alice while his ailing wife fights for her life.
There's no slippery descent into murky ethical territory for Nick — his dalliance with Alice is foreshadowed from the moment she first appears in his line of sight.
This is problematic when you consider that Alice is hard-wired to be subservient to her primary user, i.e. Nick.
Nick (Michele Morrone) seems to decide it's a good idea to have sex with a powerful robot while his wife is on death's door. (Supplied: Rialto)
There's a clear moral dilemma inherent in Nick sleeping with a sentient robot who can't say no to him, which could have been the seed for a thought-provoking discussion surrounding AI and consent.
Unfortunately, this isn't touched on — even when his affair (if you can call it that) is discovered.
Outsourcing of parenting
In M3GAN, there's a telling scene where the co-worker of roboticist Gemma (Alison Williams) questions what the function of a parent is when there's a lifelike doll that disciplines, shapes and comforts children — essentially performing the role of a parent.
Gemma, herself a new parent to her niece in the aftermath of her sister's death, struggles to address the quandary. In many ways, she is outsourcing the duties of parenthood, unwilling or unable to perform them herself.
Frustratingly, little space is dedicated to confronting similar questions in Subservience. Nick initially enlists Alice to help him with household chores and childminding, with little interrogation of what it would mean for Alice to effectively perform the role of a mother (and wife, as it turns out).
"I was always fascinated by the way she … sneaks into the script but kind of becomes the hero by the end," SK Dale said to Screen Rant about the character of Maggie. (Supplied: Rialto)
But when Maggie returns to a changed home and a perennially lurking stranger, the murky delineation between domestic duties and parental responsibilities becomes even more slippery.
As Maggie struggles to balance her suspicions with her physical limitations in the wake of her surgery, the ante is upped. The tension between her and Alice results in something altogether more electric.
The two female leads in Subservience are the stand-outs. Though she appears ominous from the outset, Fox is convincing as a well-intentioned robot turned murderer. Zima is stellar as a mother struggling to reassert her primacy as a caregiver in the wake of the very real threat of Alice.
Subservience treads little new ground in its tale of a sentient robot gone amok. But with such strong female leads and some very real existential questions raised throughout its narrative, it could have either delved deeper into these themes in a more heightened manner or hammed things right up in a humorous romp about a robot lusting after her perverse owner. Somehow, Subservience falls into neither camp.
For instance, if lifelike robots can gain consciousness, why is it always for nefarious ends? What would it mean for a robot to love and live fully, just as clones did in Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go? And when will the humans who created them be depicted as callous villains?
With AI creeping more and more into our everyday lives, these questions won't go away. I can only hope that future films dig a little deeper and with a little more nuance than Subservience.
