Starring Megan Fox, Michele Morrone 

Directed by S. K.  Dale

Vertigo

A struggling father buys a domestic AI to help look after her two children while his wife is in hospital. But the situation turns deadly when the robot develops an obsessive attachment to its new owner.

In a crucial scene early in the opening act of AI thriller Subservience, Nick (Michele Morrone) tells his recently acquired house-bot (Megan Fox) that the best way to appreciate the classic movie Casablanca is to erase all prior knowledge of it from her data banks before sitting down to watch it. Whether or not this is intentionally meta, anyone embarking on the 106 long minutes of S. K. Dale’s lacklustre sci-fi might reasonably wonder whether, if somehow they had never seen an AI-Goes-Rogue movie before, Subservience could seem in any way original, rather than the tired and entirely derivative pile of predictable stodge that it is.

Beautiful bot replaces dying wife √ Bot endears herself to child √ Struggling husband battles with desires and questions of betrayal √ Bot takes her directive to protect her primary user a bit too seriously √ Husband gets cold feet √ Possessive bot goes unstoppably loco √

And if those read like spoilers, then you’ve been living in a cave for the last fifty years – or somehow managed to erase those data banks just like Nick suggested.

M3gan, Humans, Black Mirror (specifically Be Right Back), Terminator are all in there, like a Now That’s What I Call AI compilation, along with a good few other one hit AI wonders.  When Covid finally lets me out of the house to see Afraid I’m sure I’ll find many of the same beats in that movie as well.

So does Subservience add anything to the genre?

In short? No.

Verdict: Subservience is a forgettable footnote to the AI genre, and the cringe-inducing attempts at 1970s style soft porn imagery to ‘spice things up’ only serve to make the experience even more wearyingly depressing. 2/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com