The Machine (2013)

Caradog W. James brings us a modestly budgeted British science fiction thriller in which the Ministry of Defence, deep in a second Cold War, builds a conscious android from the brain scan of a dead researcher. The film carries itself with the grim self-importance of a laboratory that has forgotten why anyone funded it. Toby Stephens glowers as the obsessive programmer. Caity Lotz does double duty as the murdered scientist and the machine built in her image, and she performs her own stunts, which is the sort of production detail that tends to impress people at festivals.

The film's real preoccupation is neurological. A soldier with a left hemispherectomy, a daughter with Rett syndrome, brain scans repurposed as software: the plot runs on questions of cognition, memory, and what remains of a person when the wiring fails. This gives the proceedings a weight that most low-budget genre pictures never approach. The machine herself develops a conscience, refuses immoral orders, and asks to be protected, which is a more interesting arc than the usual robot rampage. Ava, meanwhile, gets a measure of professional authority and moral stubbornness before the script disposes of her, though the film never organizes itself around her grievances.

Elsewhere the film keeps its gaze fixed on military and technological ethics, and little else. The enemy is the state apparatus, not the boardroom, so the economic critique stays muted. The cast is white and British in the manner of a regional repertory company. There is no engagement with racial politics, no environmental anxiety, no commentary on body image, and no historical revisionism, this being speculative fiction with no interest in the past. The screenplay debates sentience and the ethics of creation at some length, and the debates are smart, but they arrive wrapped in a thriller, so the sermonizing never quite takes over. It is a serious, chilly little film that knows exactly which arguments it wants to have, and declines to have the rest.