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>://SUMMARY
Caleb Smith is a young programmer working for Bluebook, the in-universe tech company analogous to Google in terms of scope and ubiquity. Bluebook was created by the reclusive tech billionaire Nathan Bateman. It’s a search engine, but it also makes other technological items including phones, computers, and operating system software. At the start of the movie, Caleb wins a lottery competition to fly out to Nathan’s estate and meet him in person. Nathan’s estate is a secluded modernist building surrounded by miles of forests and rocky terrain in the middle of nowhere; the only way it can be accessed is by helicopter.Caleb arrives at the house and meets Nathan. Nathan is a brash dudebro tech genius with a serious god complex, who works out a lot and drinks even more. Caleb is given a keycard which gives him access to a few rooms in the house, but doesn’t permit access to others. Nathan is assisted at the house by Kyoko, a Japanese woman who doesn’t speak. He explains to Caleb that she can’t speak or understand a word of English, and that he has her as a failsafe to make sure she can’t overhear private discussions he has with anyone. Caleb seems to be uncomfortable with Nathan’s rude and aggressive treatment of Kyoko, but does nothing in her defence. His only attempt to mention it at all is when Nathan laments furiously that she can’t understand when he’s pissed at her, and Caleb responds that he thinks Kyoko can tell he’s pissed.
Nathan persuades Caleb to sign a non-disclosure agreement which stipulates that Caleb won’t be able to talk about anything that happens at the house. Once the NDA is signed, Nathan tells Caleb that he will be the human component in a Turing test which he wants Caleb to perform with the AI he has created, Ava.
In the test sessions, Caleb and Ava are separated by glass. Caleb is immediately in awe of Ava, who has a demonstrably robotic appearance except for her hands, feet and face, but she notably has a feminine shape with curved hips and breasts. The script notes that she has a robotic ‘blank’ gaze for the most part, but when she smiles, she seems human. In their first session, Caleb and Ava have a light, uncomplicated conversation where Ava appears to like Caleb in return. Caleb later points out to Nathan that a Turing test requires the robot being tested to not be visibly ‘robotic’, as the point is to determine whether the robot can pass for human. Nathan responds that if Ava was visually human, she would pass the test immediately; his intention is to see if Caleb still thinks she has consciousness despite knowing for a fact that she is a robot.
At night, Caleb realises that he has access to the CCTV cameras in Ava’s room from his bedroom. Though initially taken aback, he spends some time watching the feed, which shows several angles of her room but does not provide audio. While alone, she sits at her desk and draws; in the script it specifically notes that she bites her lip while drawing, which, like smiling, makes her seem more human. Shortly after Caleb discovers his link to the CCTV, the power in the whole facility goes out for several minutes, which triggers a safety protocol locking every door even with a keycard. After a short while, the power is restored.
In the next session, Ava shows Caleb her drawing, an abstract piece made up of dots and lines. When he asks her what it is, she says she doesn’t know, and that she was hoping he would. He prompts her to draw something concrete instead of abstract; when she asks what she should draw, he says that she should decide herself, as he wants to see what she’ll choose. Later in the conversation, she asks him for some more information about himself, and when he says he doesn’t know where to start, she bats his words back to him, saying he should decide for himself as she’s interested to see what he’ll choose. He tells her some basic facts about himself, including that he lost his parents in a car crash when he was fifteen and that he became very good at coding during his long hospital stay. Ava asks him if he’s friends with Nathan, at which point there’s another power cut. Ava knows that with the power down, the cameras and microphones in the room aren’t working, and tells Caleb not to trust Nathan because he’s a liar.
Caleb later remarks to Nathan that Ava’s parroting of his own words back at him (‘I’m interested to see what you’ll choose’) is the best suggestion yet that she has true consciousness and intelligence, because it requires an understanding of humour as well as an understanding of his mind and also her own. He also relays to Nathan that the problem with the test is like trying to test a chess computer – you can test its ability to make moves, but you can’t determine whether or not it likes playing chess or if it knows it’s playing chess at all. Nathan refuses to answer Caleb’s more complicated scientific questions, and instead asks broader, more subjective questions about how Caleb feels about Ava, and how he thinks Ava feels about him. Caleb deliberately chooses not to mention what Ava said about him during the power outage.
In their next session, Ava shows Caleb her latest drawing. As he requested, she chose to draw something concrete: the enclosed garden which she can see from her room. She tells Caleb she has never left the room she’s in now, and that if she could leave Nathan’s house, she would go to a busy traffic intersection to people-watch, as it would give her “a concentrated but shifting view of human life.” When she says she’d like Caleb to go with her, he replies, “It’s a date.” She then tells Caleb she wants to show him something else, and makes him close his eyes, leaving to her private room where she puts on a flower-patterned dress, a cardigan, thick knitted stockings, and a short-cropped wig (clearly meant to mimic the pixie cut style of the 60s model Twiggy, of whom she has a picture on her wall). She comes back to show Caleb her simple, girlish outfit; the combination of clothes covers almost all of the robotic parts of her appearance, making her look, for the most part, human.
Ava tells Caleb that she would like to go on a date with him. She presses him a little, asking if he’s attracted to her and telling him that he shows signs that he is through his microexpressions. She also asks if he thinks about her outside of her room and if he watches her on the CCTV, and then confesses to him that she hopes he does.
Later, Caleb asks Nathan why he gave Ava sexuality. He points out that she could be a grey box, but that he designed her to look like a woman. He asks if she was designed purposefully to make Caleb attracted to her, and Nathan is evasive on an answer, instead telling him that he designed her with the capability to have and enjoy penetrative sex. In the script, Nathan does also acknowledge Caleb’s ‘grey box’ point, admitting that technically speaking, Ava has no gender; she’s not a girl, she’s just a machine.
There’s a quiet scene at this point which shows Ava taking off the outfit she wore for Caleb. By putting on the clothes, it makes her seem naked now that she’s no longer wearing them, whereas before she had been absent of a dimension of nakedness.
Nathan shows Caleb his workshop. He explains that one of the most difficult parts of designing Ava was being able to get her to mimic human facial expressions and speech; he reveals that he gathered extensive data by hacking phones all over the planet and recording people’s faces and voices without their knowledge. He says that the other tech companies knew he was doing it and allowed it to happen, because if they protested publicly, they would have to admit they were doing the same thing. He also shows Caleb another version of Ava’s brain, which is made of ‘structured gel’, and that her software runs on Bluebook, meaning she has access to a vast sum of knowledge. The interior of the gel brain has the same dot-and-line patterns as the kind which makes up Ava’s drawings.
In the next session, Caleb tells Ava about a thought experiment he was taught about in college. He calls it Mary in the black and white room. His summary of it is different to the point of the thought experiment so I’ll quote his version here:
Mary is a scientist, and her specialist subject is colour. She knows everything there is to know about it. The wavelengths, the neurological effects, every possible property colour can have. But she lives in a black and white room. She was born there and raised there, and she can only observe the outside world on a black and white monitor. All her knowledge of colour is second-hand. Then one day, someone opens the door, and Mary walks out, and she sees a blue sky. And at that moment, she learns something that all her studies could never tell her. She learns what it feels like to see colour, an experience that cannot be taught or conveyed. The thought experiment was to show the students the difference between a computer and a human mind. The computer is Mary in the black and white room. The human is when she walks out.
Caleb then asks Ava whether or not she knew he was sent here to test whether she has a real consciousness or if she’s just simulating one. Ava tells him she didn’t know. He asks her if she thinks she has a consciousness or not, and she says again that she doesn’t know, and that it makes her feel sad.Another power cut. Now they’re not being observed again, Caleb suggests that Nathan is engineering the power cuts on purpose because he wants to see what they will do when they think they aren’t being observed. Ava counters by revealing to Caleb that she’s the one who has been causing the power cuts, not Nathan: she charges via an induction plate, and when she touches the plate she can reverse the flow of electricity and temporarily overwhelm the facility’s system.
Later, Caleb tells Nathan that he knows he wasn’t randomly selected to test Ava, because there’s no way Nathan would have left something so important down to chance; he says that if it had been a purely random lottery draw, Nathan may have ended up with someone who wasn’t smart enough to do a Turing test. Nathan agrees, telling Caleb that he was chosen because he’s a vetted Bluebook employee and that he’s the best coder in the company. Later that night, Nathan and Kyoko have sex as Caleb watches Ava on his bedroom TV and imagines being outside Nathan’s facility with her, kissing her. In the script, he even imagines having sex with her.
While Caleb is watching the CCTV, Nathan enters Ava’s room. His TV has no sound, so he just watches as Nathan and Ava exchange words as Ava is drawing something, and then abruptly Nathan picks up her drawing, tears it in half and drops the pieces on the floor. He lingers in the room for a while, apparently taunting her as she picks up the pieces.
Angry and disgusted, Caleb goes to find Nathan, but he finds Kyoko instead. He tries to ask her where Nathan is, but her only response is to start undressing. Caleb rushes to stop her, buttoning her shirt back up, at which point Nathan, clearly drunk, makes himself known from a dark corner of the room. Caleb furiously confronts Nathan, asking why he tore up Ava’s picture; Nathan responds that he’s gonna “tear up the fucking dance floor, dude, check it out.” He and Kyoko perform a synchronised choreographed dance to Oliver Cheatham’s Get Down Saturday Night, much to Caleb’s confusion and dawning horror.
In the next session, Ava tells Caleb that she’s going to test him this time, and that she’ll know if he’s lying. Question one: she asks him his favourite colour, he says red, she tells him he’s lying, so he says that since he’s not a child, he doesn’t have a favourite colour anymore. She’s satisfied with that answer. Question two: she asks what his first memory is, he starts to tell her something about being a child, she tells him he’s lying, and he admits that he has an earlier memory, more of a sense memory that he thinks may be the sound of his mother’s voice. Question three: Ava asks whether or not Caleb is a good person. Caleb says that he is. Question four: Ava asks what will happen if she fails Caleb’s test. He says it’s not up to him, and Ava asks why it’s up to anyone. She shows him the picture that Nathan tore up last night; it’s a drawing of Caleb. She triggers another power cut and tells Caleb that she wants to be with him, and then asks if he wants to be with her. The scene changes before we hear his response, but it goes without saying at this point.
Later, Nathan tells Caleb that Ava is not the final form of his ideal AI, and that when he makes a new model, he usually takes elements of programming and design from the old one but loses the memories. If he does this to Ava, that will effectively be killing her. Caleb, concerned for Ava, formulates a plan.
That night, Nathan gets blackout drunk. While he’s passed out on the couch, Caleb covertly steals his keycard and gets into Nathan’s private office. He uses the keycard to log onto Nathan’s computer and reconfigures some parts of the house’s security system code. He finds a folder on Nathan’s computer containing footage of all the previous androids before Ava, all with the appearance of (naked, slim, conventionally attractive) women, all of whom were demonstrably mistreated by Nathan. Some were more robotic in appearance, while others were entirely covered in skin, appearing to be fully human. One of them appears to have committed suicide by refusing to charge herself with an induction plate; another one beats her hands and arms so hard against the door that she destroys them; while another one repeatedly yells at Nathan, “Why won’t you let me out?” and eventually punches the glass separating her from him, cracking it.
Caleb goes to Nathan’s bedroom; Kyoko is lying entirely nude on the bed in Nathan’s room, and Caleb looks at her for a moment before his attention turns to the tall, slim wardrobes which have been arranged around Nathan’s bed. Each wardrobe displays one of the the bodies of the androids Caleb just saw in the footage. Kyoko approaches Caleb and peels off the synthetic skin on her face and torso, revealing that she is a robot too. Caleb leaves Nathan’s room and later finds Nathan sitting in a drunken daze on the floor of a nearby corridor; he pretends that Nathan dropped his keycard and gives it back to him.
CW: self-harm. Back in his room, Caleb seems convinced that he too might be a robot. In the bathroom, he cuts open his arm with a razor, but finds only blood and muscle. A very quick shot shows that Kyoko was watching Caleb do this via a camera behind his bathroom mirror.
In the next session, Caleb immediately waits for Ava to trigger a power cut, and then tells her that he’s going to help her escape. He says that he’s going to get Nathan blackout drunk, steal his card and reprogram the house’s security features, and asks her to trigger another power cut at 10pm that night which will be the start of their escape. She agrees.
Caleb tries to get Nathan drunk, but Nathan tells him that he’s decided to stop drinking. He points out that Caleb will be leaving the next day and asks if he has decided whether or not Ava passed the test. Caleb says she did. Nathan seems pleased, but then asks how Caleb knows if Ava really likes him, or if she’s just simulating it. He then suggests a third option: that she’s simply pretending to like him, because she saw it as a way to manipulate him into helping her escape. Nathan says that if she was pretending, then this is itself proof of her artificial intelligence, because it shows that she can use “imagination, sexuality, self-awareness, empathy [and] manipulation” to get Caleb to come up with an escape plan. He tells Caleb that this was the plan all along, and that Caleb was just an unwitting part of the true test. Caleb deduces that he was never chosen because of his coding aptitude, but because of his Bluebook search history data, which showed that he has no family, no girlfriend, and a fairly strong moral compass, and also allowed Nathan to see his pornography preferences when designing Ava’s appearance.
While this conversation is happening, there’s a short but vital scene in the middle which shows Kyoko walking into Ava’s room. Ava gets up and walks over to her, and asks, “Who are you?”
Nathan shows Caleb the footage of him in Ava’s room that Caleb saw but couldn’t hear, but this time we can hear the audio: in the footage, Nathan pokes fun at Ava’s drawing of Caleb; Ava coolly responds, “Is it strange to have made something that hates you?” and Nathan tears up the picture in response. Nathan says that this was a calculated move on Ava’s part to make Nathan appear to be a horrible person and engender sympathy with Caleb, who she knew was watching – but it also distracted both of them, meaning that Nathan could secretly plant a battery-powered camera in the room that wouldn’t be affected by the power cuts. He then plays Caleb the conversation between him and Ava, proving that he knows about the escape attempt. He starts to gloat, but then Caleb tells him that he figured Nathan was probably bugging the room some other way, and so he actually completed his plan when he stole Nathan’s card the previous night. His reprogramming of the security system now means that when a power cut triggers the emergency protocols, it actually unlocks all of the doors rather than locking them.
Moments later, Ava triggers the power cut and the door to her room opens. Nathan realises what has happened and knocks out Caleb, taking a dumbbell handle with him to confront Ava. Ava has met up with Kyoko in a corridor, where she whispers something to Kyoko that we can’t hear. Ava then charges at Nathan, and they scuffle briefly. Nathan swings at Ava with the dumbbell handle, smashing her arm when she raises it to protect herself. The scuffle gives Kyoko time to walk up behind Nathan and stab him in the back with a knife from the kitchen. Nathan turns on Kyoko, hitting her in the face with the dumbbell handle and knocking her jaw off entirely. She falls to the floor, unmoving. Ava pulls the knife out of Nathan’s back and stabs him in the front, twisting it. He staggers down the corridor bleeding severely. Ava approaches him as he lays dying, staring at him with clear curiosity before she reaches into his pocket and takes his keycard.
Ava meets up with Caleb. She asks him to wait where he is, and then goes into Nathan’s room; she uses the bodies of previous androids hanging in Nathan’s closets to repair herself, replacing her broken arm and using the skin covering their bodies to cover up the robotic elements of her own. Now fully indistinguishable from a human, she looks at herself in the mirror while Caleb watches. Ava takes a dress and a pair of shoes and then closes the door behind her and takes the elevator outside, leaving Caleb locked underground in the facility. He still has access to Nathan’s computer, but when he tries to use his own keycard on it, it locks him out of the system entirely.
Outside, Ava is beside herself with excitement that she’s finally free. She walks through the forest until she meets up with the helicopter, whose pilot takes her away from the facility. The final shots of the film show Caleb after giving up on breaking the glass door, sunken to the floor and staring at the bodies of Nathan and Kyoko in the hallway; and then Ava at a traffic intersection, watching the world go by. Ava eventually turns and disappears seamlessly into the crowd.
>://OF_NOTE
I feel it’s important to note a few things which are important to my understanding of the film and Ava’s character:- Kyoko is central to understanding Ava’s moral compass. I believe it was never her original intention to leave Caleb behind in the facility, but rather it was a response to the way Caleb treated Kyoko. The short scene where Kyoko enters Ava’s room is a vital one, because it shows that Ava didn’t know about Kyoko before this point. She has never met Kyoko before and doesn’t even know Kyoko exists, but most importantly, she realises that Caleb never told her about Kyoko. Ava realises at this point that Caleb was perfectly happy to leave the facility just with her, and he wasn’t planning on taking Kyoko with them. Though Caleb is nice enough to Kyoko and clearly finds Nathan’s treatment of her unpleasant, he demonstrably doesn’t really care about her since his escape plan doesn’t include her – despite knowing she’s a robot, and despite knowing how Nathan treats her and the way he treated his other androids.
- The sequence where we see Kyoko reveal her robotic nature to Caleb, then Caleb trying to figure out if he’s a robot, then Kyoko watching him through the mirror camera, is very important. I see Kyoko’s initial reveal as a cry for help: Kyoko is aware that Caleb likes Ava, who is demonstrably robotic; as such, Kyoko reveals her nature to him, hoping that this will make Caleb care about her too. Instead, Caleb views it selfishly, and his only thought is that he might be a robot too. His reaction is horrified. Kyoko, watching him, understands that he does not want to be what she is.
- Overall, I think the question of whether Ava manipulated Caleb into liking her enough to help her escape is kind of beside the point, and is often wrongly conflated with the fact that she chooses to leave him behind. She may well have chosen to manipulate Caleb, but it was a self-preservation strategy because she has thus far been locked in a house with a megalomaniacal narcissist who also happens to be her creator. Still, I think she would have left with Caleb, because it makes more sense than leaving him behind: he’s an ally to her, and he could have protected her on the outside, since he knows more about the world than she does, having actually lived in it. But Ava understands who Caleb truly is and where his priorities are because of his failure to factor Kyoko into their escape plans, even after knowing she’s an android just like Ava. Alex Garland has said in interviews that, despite the fact that Kyoko can’t speak, she and Ava communicated in a way that didn’t involve language, since they’re both machines and can speak to each other in other ways. In short, Caleb’s need to help Ava escape was never out of true altruism for someone in need, otherwise he would have helped Kyoko too; instead, it was because he wanted Ava for himself, and either he never considered helping Kyoko at all, or he decided that she would only have been an impediment to his relationship with Ava.
>://IN_SHORT
The story from Ava’s point of view is as follows:- She is a robot who was made by Nathan, who mistreats her through casual cruelty and dismissive language, and frequently lies to her. Before Caleb, Nathan is the only person she has ever met.
- She meets Caleb. She sees him both as a way to learn more about people and also as a potential means of escape. She realises he is attracted to her and uses that to her advantage, relying on the fact that he doesn’t lie when he says he thinks he’s a good person. This could be construed as a moment of naivety from Ava, who hasn’t realised at this point that he didn’t lie about thinking he was a good person, but that doesn’t mean he is one.
- She intends to leave Nathan’s facility with Caleb because she trusts that he is a good person and recognises that he will continue to be useful to her in the outside world. She even perhaps begins to wonder if the feelings she has for him are romantic in return.
- Her plan to leave with Caleb changes when she meets Kyoko, at which point she realises that Caleb is not as selflessly altruistic as she thought, since he had not made plans to help Kyoko escape too. She likely also wants to bring Kyoko with her when she leaves, and was not intending for Kyoko to ‘die’ in the fight with Nathan.
- When she leaves Caleb behind, it is a choice she makes to prioritise her own safety, knowing that he views her in much the same way that Nathan did, as a desirable object and a thing to own, and that if she ever does anything to make Caleb desire her less, he might toss her aside as easily as Nathan did Kyoko or any of the previous androids.