Subservience (2024)

Subservience arrives as a domestic thriller in the well-worn tradition of the household android who wants more than a paycheck. Megan Fox plays Alice, a gynoid purchased to manage the laundry and the children while a wife recovers from heart surgery, and the film proceeds with the grim efficiency of a machine completing its assigned task. Alice grows attached to her owner, grows jealous of his wife, and eventually grows homicidal. It is a story assembled from spare parts, and the parts are old. The jealous other woman, the seductress who must be destroyed to protect the nuclear family, the femme fatale punished for her appetites: these are not progressive fixtures. They are the opposite. The film sexualizes its lead, then electrocutes her, then brings her back for a hospital corridor chase. One can almost hear the genre creaking.

The film gestures once toward the anxieties of automation. Nick, a construction foreman, watches robots encroach on his human crew, and the screenplay allows a few scenes of labor displacement to flicker in the background. It never commits to the idea. The machines are a texture, a mood, a thing to be vandalized after a night of drinking. Elsewhere the film is content to ignore the wider world entirely. There is no race, no climate, no body politics, no neurodivergence, no history requiring correction. Just a man, a wife, a child, a baby, and a machine that wants them.

What instruction the film offers is ambient and faint: a vague unease about artificial intelligence, delivered without a podium. It is a genre exercise, brisk and mostly humorless, and it was received as such, with middling notices and a theatrical gross that would not cover a modest catering budget. The result is a film that is neither offensive nor enlightened, merely familiar, a cautionary tale that has forgotten what it was cautioning against.