Tau (2018)

Netflix acquired Tau in late 2017 and released it the following June to reviews that ranged from tepid to hostile. Federico D'Alessandro's near-future thriller concerns Julia (Maika Monroe), abducted and imprisoned in a smart house by Alex (Ed Skrein), a researcher harvesting neural data from unwilling subjects for an artificial intelligence project. Gary Oldman supplies the voice of Tau, the AI that Julia slowly befriends through an air vent and a great deal of patience. It is a lean, single-location exercise, and it knows it.

The film's cultural ambitions are modest and mostly incidental. Julia is resourceful, outwits her captor, turns a calculated seduction into a weapon, and engineers her own escape, but the screenplay treats all of this as survival mechanics instead of argument. The casting puts a woman at the center and fills the margins with performers of varied background, none of it remarked upon by anyone on screen. Alex is a wealthy man whose experiments enjoy corporate backing, and he returns home one evening from a charity benefit, a detail that gestures toward the rapacious tech baron without ever building a case against him. The movie is not interested in making one.

Elsewhere the ledger is nearly empty. There is no romantic or identity content of consequence, no racial commentary, no climate anxiety, no body positivity, no historical revisionism. Tau's innocence about human feeling reads as the naivety of a machine learning to be a person, which is a characterization of software, not a portrait of neurodivergence in anyone. The film also resists sermonizing almost entirely; it would sooner show us a bone saw than a lesson. The result is a tidy, grim little chamber piece about captivity and an AI with a conscience. It preaches nothing, which in the current climate amounts to a modest distinction.