Review of “Subservience” – Megan Fox’s AI android for home service becomes a villain in a kitschy thriller | Film

PPeople have criticized Megan Fox in the past for her lack of expressiveness, which may or may not be due to all the plastic surgery she's admitted to having. But by playing an android in this sci-fi/horror film, it's almost as if she's hitting back at her critics, having fun as a robot woman with a toned body straight out of a lingerie catalog, lips like padded roll bars, and an almost permanently frozen, inscrutable expression on her face – all the better to hide the murderous code running through her CPU. If the film were just a little smarter and less predictable, it might have had a chance to become a cult classic.

Apparently shot in Bulgaria, which passes for America in the future, the film initially centers on an average middle-class nuclear family. Father Nick Perretti (Michele Morrone) is a bit of a douchebag but a devoted husband to his wife Maggie (player of the game Madeline Zima, who always deserved better career-wise) and father of two children, elementary schooler Isla (Matilda Firth) and toddler Max (Jude Greenstein). When Maggie is hospitalized for an extended period with a heart condition while they wait for a suitable organ donor, Nick succumbs to the temptation to buy a domestic helper android, whom Isla names Alice (Fox). And like M3gan, another servant in another recent horror film, Alice is one programming error away from acting on her own and trying to take Maggie's place as mistress of the house. It's like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and all those other crazy nanny movies from the 1990s, but with an AI update that, like almost all AI updates, wasn't really needed.

In fact, Will Honley and April Maguire's script is pretty obviously anti-AI, especially when it comes to the threat it poses to work and employment, a subject that is very dear to the film industry. And there's some really funny-sad dialogue from Zima's Maggie when she thinks she's dying and tries to give Nick parenting advice for the kids in the future, like asking him to tell Max not to hang posters of bands in his dorm room “because those kids never have sex.” But the ending is a pre-packaged denouement protocol and as such is pretty boring, right down to the hint that there might be a sequel.