Subservience
Subservience
Subservience: if you happen to be someone who indulges regularly in direct to streaming movies, then it must be evident to you that Megan Fox is gradually earning a place as a respectable actress for some decent trashy viewing.
She’s not yet received that much acclaim for the movies she has participated but if she can turn an average film out of a plot about a sexy nanny who has an affair with the boss and tries to take the wife’s place – only that the nanny here is a robot – then there must be something right with her.
Nick (Michele Morrone) might be a construction foreman but he surely must be doing quite well because when his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) suffers a heart attack before sexy times, he quickly rushes to the robot department store to get a helper. Fortunately, his younger daughter has taken a fancy towards Alice (Fox) and not any of the boring models that are available in the showroom and no doubt flying out of it.
When it comes to films based around the theme of AI, there are usually two kinds of horror subdivisions. The first one is, “Oh no, our house is haunted”, where by means of an AI house-help, phone app, doll, etc. evil stuff like deranged murder is done – in other words, there is no human to this AI. The second (and this is the last) is, “Oh no, our maid / butler / sexbot has been possessed”, in which a human is the murderous AI. So, a familiar notion continues its life with Subservience.
That is usually, films like that are way lesser in interest because it is report just that there is an evil person which we don’t even care to know what other things she is capable of doing but Subservience pulls out a few tricks to keep the interest levels up.
For one, Alice is not evil at the root: there is Nick’s inadequate programming of Alice that makes her far too interested in him (not easy with other family members around). And oh, Nick? He is insensitive.
Alice is not just a bedmate to him but he goes on and then tells her that it was a mistake and we can never go through that again which sucks the life out of this for a period of about fifteen minutes or so and he is transformed into the clinical presentation of fatal attraction. And as in many pictures of that stripe, by and large, having home bots is not a brand new thing either. As the movie progresses, we understand better and better how they are trying to change the world.
First, it’s not as if it’s practical to be a ‘construction worker’ if your boss can hire some efficient construction nanobots. This means Nick has to pick between his colleagues positioned on the cutting board and getting a regular pay check (again, he’s sort of a jerk).
It is a bit of a surprise that this is not one of the common, epidemic, epidemic Subservience films where medical expenses drive our protagonist into….let us say morally ambiguous situation in this case. Why is this surprising? Because you are hardly any sane person can condemn obstetricians for at least the first 20 minutes of this film. Or, when Nick (‘the dick’) finally shows up, we learn that it is Annie who is the one who is in desperate need of a heart and kidney. Surely, hospital costs are down because yes, robots are doing all the heavy lifting there too.
Despite the fact that the narrative centers around Alice’s fall into homicidal urges, it does not have any effect of removing or minimizing the degree of culpability anticipated with regard to the crimes committed. If everywhere there are such robots doing all the manual work, as one could expect they would, and those robots can turn homicidal as the case with Alice then there sounds trouble for the entire population.
It may be true that it portrays the usual “I am committing this insane murdery thing for your own benefit” thrills, but there is just enough more on the edges than Fox and Zima being able to do enough of the work so that it does not just feel like a cruise control work.
It’s very much more of the same, and how much you get out of this will depend a lot on a): your level of interest in sexy robots and b): your level of interest in evil robots. But within those parameters, this does manage a few memorable moments: is it ever going to be a good idea to let the robots take care of the humans?
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- Genre: Sci-fic, Thriller
- Country: United States
- Director: Scott Dale
- Cast: Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima
