Oh M3GAN, what have you borne?
Hot on the heals of the recent Afraid, which concerned AI run amuck in a family’s home (and was not screened for critics), comes Subservience, about a near future in which lifelike robots are purchased or hired to help families or companies in need. This story centers on father Nick (Michele Morrone), whose wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) is in need of a heart transplant and must stay in the hospital until a donor becomes available. Already behind on the construction project he’s in charge of, Nick buys a helper robot that his daughter Isla (Matilda Firth) names Alice, after her favorite book. Rather than make these robots look like featureless automatons, they look like unique people. (Alice looks a lot like Megan Fox, apparently, so the filmmakers hired Megan Fox to play her!)
Alice not only does what she’s told but anticipates her owner’s needs around the house and sometimes completes a task before being asked. She’s also the perfect babysitter, able to not only read Isla stories at night but do so in her mother’s voice. Directed by S.K. Dale (Till Death) and written by Will Honley and April Maguire, Subservience decides at a certain point that being a tech-based thriller isn’t enough and decides to add “erotic” to its list of descriptors, with Alice deciding that Nick’s life is made easier when he isn’t as stressed and she decides to give him a certain type of… release. The idea that these robots were made anatomically correct isn’t mentioned once in the movie, and the fact that Fox’s Alice is wearing fairly high-end lingerie under the fairly standard uniform makes absolutely no sense, but when you hire Fox to play your robotic domestic helper, I guess you play to her strengths.
Because he’s not a complete letch, Nick actually feels bad about his encounter with Alice, and tries to explain to her why it can never happen again. But after a bit of reprogramming of Alice’s twisted loyalty and attachment to Nick’s wellbeing, she starts to eliminate anything she perceives as threatening to his happiness, including his sick wife and anxiety-riddled child. Nick is forced to fight off Alice to keep her from doing this while also keeping control of the construction site, whose crew of human workers are replaced by robots to help get it back on schedule. His world is closing in on him from all sides, and things tighten even further when it appears Alice is capable of infecting other robots and overriding their programming that involves not harming humans.
To be clear, all of this is very dumb, from the story to Fox’s glitchy performance. Any time Alice takes in any new information, she tilts her head slightly. Why? And why would the manufacturers of these robots make most of them objectively good looking (we see plenty of male- and female-looking robots with various faces; most are meant to look attractive. Again, why?)
And a pointless subplot involving Nick’s best friend on the job coming after him, threatening to reveal that he took part in an act of massive vandalism at the job site makes no sense and is only there so that Alice can take care of the problem in her special, dead-eyed way. There are scenes that take place well after it’s established that Alice is a danger to this family that give her far too many opportunities to do more damage. And why does everyone simply walk away when they assume a robot is “dead”? They’re never dead in movies. M3GAN 2.0 is supposed to come out in the summer of 2025; I’m going to avoid these dopey ripoffs until that one arrives to dazzle me.
The film is now available digitally.
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