By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
The advent of AI in the form of programs like ChatGPT and Dall-E 2 has triggered intense speculation about the role of this technology and how it can both enhance and disrupt our daily lives. It’s a debate that continues to rage through Hollywood, with many of the evil robot films of yesteryear being replaced with new films about new kinds of dangers (like the new Mission Impossible films having bodiless AI as their Big Bad). If you want a film that wraps the anxieties of yesterday and today into a sleek and sexy vision of tomorrow, then it’s time for you to watch Subservience on Netflix.
The Plot Of Subservience
Subservience is a movie about a construction foreman whose wife’s illness forces him to purchase a lifelike female android to help out around the house. Unfortunately, the robot develops feelings for her human master, and it starts looking like he feels the same way. When the robot decides to go all Single Byte Female and try to kill the man’s wife, though, the flesh-and-blood couple must team up in a fight for their own survival…one which might just become a fight for the soul of humanity.
The cast of Subservience is intimately small and includes Italian actor Michele Morrone as the man who buys a bot to help out when his wife (Madeline Zima, best known for roles on The Nanny and Californication) gets sick. The rest of the cast includes Matilda Firth, Andrew Whipp, and Jude Allen Greenstein. But the real star of the show is Megan Fox, whose experience in embodying both sensuality and horror in films like Jennifer’s Body helps her bring to life a sexy robot who just can’t be contained by her own programming.
It’s No M3GAN And That’s Okay
Subservience doesn’t really have much of a box office because it was released on digital first, though it did scoop up a paltry $246,010 from a brief theatrical run that included places like Russia and Lithuania. On digital, the movie baffled critics and currently has a 52 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. In general, critics complained that the film was predictable, and some compared the movie negatively to more inventive killer AI fare such as M3GAN.
So, I can hear you cranking up those keyboards now to ask me the big question: why the heck am I recommending that you watch a direct-to-streaming video that critics mostly hated? For one thing, Megan Fox is pitch-perfect as the robot that threatens to tear apart this family’s life by being anything but robotic. It’s actually her misplaced passion that causes all of these problems in the first place, and the subtext that it’s actually her humanity that makes her so inhumane to the world is disturbing in its bleak profundity.
Plus, Subservience does a good job of metaphorically dramatizing the different public reactions to the invention of AI. The movie makes explicit that our male lead is worried about how the arrival of perfectly human replicas will affect his construction job and labor in general. This doesn’t keep him from fooling around with his own robot, of course, and his character ultimately encapsulates both our fascination for and fear of this new technology.
Finally, your mileage may vary, but I enjoyed the movie’s clear thesis that the road to the AI apocalypse is paved with good intentions. Our main character has good reasons for buying a robotic helper in the first place, and even his moment of weakness with her is couched in terms of relieving his stress so he can provide for his family and his employees. Nonetheless, it soon becomes clear that AI is destructive no matter how well-intentioned its users are, and that’s a message that, frankly, more people could stand to hear.
Will you find Subservience a moving meditation on the dangers of AI, or will you turn it off to go watch M3GAN again? You won’t know until you stream it on Netflix and decide for yourself. Afterward, you may never see AI – or Megan Fox – the same way again.
