Review: Subservience

If you're the kind of person who watches a lot of direct-to-streaming movies, you'll have noticed that Megan Fox is slowly becoming a name you can trust when it comes to halfway decent trash viewing. Not everything she's in is gold standard, but if she can make a decent film out of a story about a sexy nanny who sleeps with the boss then tries to replace the wife - only here the nanny is a robot - then she's doing something right.

Nick (Michele Morrone) is a construction foreman who must be making a decent living, because when his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) has a pre-sexy times heart attack he's quickly off down to the robot department store to purchase a helper. Fortunately for him, his younger daughter takes a liking to Alice (Fox) and not one of the many non-hot models that are no doubt flying off the showroom floor.

Horror movies about AI tend to fall into two categories. The first is "oh no, our house is possessed", where an AI assistant or app or doll uses the power of AI to do a bunch of evil murdery stuff - basically, the AI is non human. The second is "oh no, our maid / butler / sexbot is possessed", where a human is playing the murdery AI. And so it goes with Subservience.

Those films are usually less interesting because it's basically just an evil person and we know the kinds of things they can do, but Subservience pulls out a few tricks to keep the interest levels up. Alice isn't intrinsically evil, for one: Nick's poor programming leaves her fixated on him (bad move when there are other family members) and enables her to fully commit to her forbidden love. Also, Nick? Bit of a dick.

Not only does he have sex with Alice, he then does the whole "it was a mistake, we can never do that again" thing, turning this for maybe fifteen minutes or so into the robot version of Fatal Attraction. Also, unlike most movies of this stripe, having home robots is not a brand new thing. As the movie goes on we see more and more how they're reshaping the world.

For one, "construction worker" isn't really a viable career when your boss can just rent some super strong robots. Suddenly Nick's loyalties are torn between his workmates on the chopping block and bringing in a steady income (again, he's kind of a dick). 

Somewhat surprisingly, this is not one of the many, many recent films where having to pay medical bills forces our lead into a morally dubious corner. This is surprising because for the first 20 minutes or so you'd be forgiven for thinking Maggie (who is nowhere to be seen) was dead, and then when Nick (the dick) does finally visit her we discover she's in dire need of a transplant. Presumably hospital costs are down because yes, robots are doing all the heavy lifting there too. 

While the focus remains on Alice's descent into murderous evil, all these background details gradually build up, creating a wider sense of unease. If robots are all around us doing all the work - as you'd expect they would - and they can turn nasty like Alice, then everyone is in a lot of trouble.

So while this does deliver the usual "I'm doing this insane murdery thing for your own good" thrills, there's just enough going on around the edges - plus decent performances from Fox and Zima - to keep it from feeling like it's just going through the motions. 

In the end it's still more of the same, and how much you get out of this will depend a lot on a): your interest in sexy robots and b): your interest in evil robots. But within those parameters, this does manage a few memorable moments: is letting robots take care of humans ever going to be a good idea?

- Anthony Morris