Director: SK Dale
Stars: Megan Fox, Madeline Zima, Michele Morrone
SK Dale and Megan Fox made for a nasty little team up three years ago with gory thriller Till Death (currently sat unassumingly on Prime and a more than adequate way to squirm through an evening), so it makes sense to see them reunited here for Dale’s latest feature; a swerve into the increasingly popular range of tech-paranoia pictures warning of the dangers of AI. Sitting somewhere between M3GAN and AfrAId (particularly in terms of quality and smarts), Subservience imagines a near future in which lifelike androids are sold as home commodities to take care of all the menial chores.
Megan Fox is one such android; Emma, a sleek and demure robo-housewife for Nick (Michele Morrone), whose beloved Maggie (Madeline Zima; a shrewd casting choice given her young role in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle) is convalescing in the hospital. Nick – who doesn’t seem that busy himself – makes what must be a credit-crippling purchase from a showroom at the behest of his pleading daughter Isla (Matilda Firth). As is de rigueur for these pictures, Emma speaks in a sort of eerie, sing-song monotone, favours blank expressions and glassy eyed stares. Nick thinks of Emma simply as a godsend, and quickly fits into a pattern of treating ‘her’ like both a maid and a housewife.
There’s an evident unsavoury element to the early stretches of Subservience which play out like some kind of chilling incel fantasy of having a Megan Fox slave lurking about the house and the ease with which even unassuming men like Nick might fall into the complacent attitudes of a ’50s aesthetic in which women (real or synthesised) are slotted into roles and forgotten about. Catching Emma patching some damage to her leg, Nick is shyly aroused by the android in – of course – sexually provocative lingerie. The scene serves to illustrate Emma’s quick self-repair abilities (a threat for later on), but it is underscored with an eroticised charge.
With amusing inevitability, it’s not long before Emma is purring dully about fulfilling desires, placing Nick’s hands on her chest and exposing her power buttons. When the expected sex scene ultimately – ahem – comes, it at least feels as though Fox is engaging in, slyly mocking – and perhaps even celebrating – her persona as an object of sexual fantasy, and Emma’s role as sexual aggressor allows us permission to enjoy it. Still, the misogynistic fantasy beneath it is undeniable. Maggie’s return to the household and the comparative passion of her nighttime reunion with Nick almost provides a healthy, fulfilling, sex-positive counterpoint… until Emma interrupts them of course.
The allure of the family unit is what Nick seems to desire most, staring longingly through the window at his neighbours sitting down to dinner. It’s here that Subservience most admires conformity and conservatism, boxing up societal ideals for us. Emma’s ultimate heartlessness places value on a living partner, but also finds terror in the idea of independence once she’s gone rogue. It can’t really help but play as a fear of a slave – a sexualised slave – rising up to defy a satisfied owner.
After acting the tenacious, victimised protagonist at the heart of Till Death, its fun to see Fox mixing it up for Dale and playing the homicidal ice queen for this outing, but there’s a spark of originality missing in Subservience akin to the glazed appearance of Emma’s eyes. A sense that we’ve ran this program before.
Subservience goes down usual routes, commenting on how automation replaces human action when Nick loses his construction job to synthetic workers (androids that feel inspired by the ‘Working Joes’ from the video game Alien: Isolation). And while this does remind us that in supplanting ourselves we lose both jobs and the human touch in our work and our art, the picture is comfortable adding to the collective chorus of worry rather than proffering a new verse. Scenes of workers reacting against androids with violent activism at least engages with more aggressive feelings of unrest and rebellion, but the blackmail storyline that grows from it seems depressingly unambitious.
It’s a slick enough production especially for the straight-to-streaming market, with Jed Palmer’s score bathing sleek imagery in cotton wool synths, while Morrone fulfils his duties as an off-brand Oscar Isaac just fine. By virtue of the character type, Fox’s star power is on a contained cruise control, but her physicality is impressive and unnervingly precise throughout (that UV mouth-torch application is, to say the least, unfortunate-looking, however). As a fan of batshit ’90s erotic thrillers and the long trashy [x]-from-hell subgenre, this is a fun, often playful sci-fi variant. But it lacks the ingenuity to evolve into something more substantial and the third act sort of trundles through some Terminator-lite machinations.
The Lost Highway Hotel 