People used to rag on Megan Fox for her lack of expressiveness, which may or may not be attributable to all the cosmetic surgery she’s copped to having. But by playing an android in this piece of sci-fi/horror fluff, it’s almost like she’s clapping back at her detractors, having fun as a robot lady with a sculpted body straight out of a lingerie catalogue, lips like padded roll bars, and an almost permanently frozen, inscrutable expression – all the better to hide the murderous code scrolling through her CPU. If only the film were a little bit smarter and less predictable, it might have had a chance of becoming a cult classic.
Shot it seems in Bulgaria, passing for an America sometime in the future, Subservience revolves at first around an average middle-class nuclear family. Father Nick Perretti (Michele Morrone) is a bit of big dumb lug, but a devoted husband to wife Maggie (player-of-the-match Madeline Zima, who’s always deserved better career-wise) and father to two kids, primary-school-aged Isla (Matilda Firth) and toddler Max (Jude Greenstein). When Maggie’s weak heart sends her to the hospital for a prolonged spell as they wait for a suitable organ donor, Nick succumbs to the temptation to buy a domestic-service android whom Isla names Alice (Fox). And like M3gan, another servant-substitute in another recent horror film, Alice is only a programming error away from going rogue and trying to take over from Maggie as the lady of the house. It’s like The Hand That Rocked the Cradle and all those other crazed-nanny movies from the 1990s, but with an AI update that, like nearly all AI updates, you didn’t really need.
Actually, the script by Will Honley and April Maguire is pretty obviously anti-AI, especially when it comes to the threat it poses to labour and employment, a subject close to the film industry’s heart. And there’s some genuinely funny-sad dialogue from Zima’s Maggie when she thinks she’s dying and tries to pass on parenting advice to Nick for the kids in future, like asking him to tell Max not to have posters for bands in his dorm room “because those kids never get laid”. But the ending is an off-the-shelf denouement protocol and as such kind of a bore, right down to the hint that their might be a sequel.
