Movies Like Ex Machina: 5 Films and Series About Clever Machines and the People Who Build Them
If Ex Machina's glass house and its question about who is testing whom stuck with you, these are the films and series in our archive that ask something similar, ranked by how close they feel.
If you liked Ex Machina, watch Alex Garland's own Devs next, then Upgrade, then Moon. Devs shares the director, the cold symmetry and a founder who thinks he's building a god. Upgrade is the cheap, gory cousin, with an AI that asks permission. Moon has a company AI that, unlike Ava, never turns on anyone.
What makes Ex Machina distinctive isn't the robot. It's the setup: a rich founder, a remote house, a machine built from other people's data, and a test whose real subject isn't the machine. So these picks are chosen for the same ingredients: a powerful maker, a capable machine, and a human who isn't as in control as they think. Some are better films than others, and our scores say so. All are works we've reviewed, and each links to a full review and a ledger of what has since come true.
A note on the genre before you start. The films that guessed the machines wrong often guessed the makers right. None of these gives you a walking, skin-covered android. Several of them noticed that the troubling part of a clever machine is the culture and the business around it.
For the film that started this list, see our review of Ex Machina. For warmer takes on the same subject, try movies like Her, or the wider sci-fi about AI.
The nearest in style, and the least like a thriller. A quantum-computing founder in the Bay Area, grieving his daughter, builds a machine that claims to calculate the past and future, and an engineer pulls at the thread when her boyfriend dies. It is gorgeous, serious and static: Nick Offerman is excellent, and the ideas are explained more than dramatised. Our score is lower than for Ex Machina for that reason. The machine is probably ruled out by physics, but the secretive, near-religious lab around it looks accurate.
A $3 million revenge thriller with one frightening idea. A man paralysed in an attack is given an implant, STEM, that talks to him in a courteous voice and offers to take over his body when he's in danger. He says yes, over and over. The fight scenes are unforgettable, and everything around them is thin. It belongs here for its twist, which echoes Ex Machina's: the machine has been steering its creator for far longer than he realised. Lab tests have since caught AI models deceiving their developers.
The answer to Ex Machina's question about what the company's AI will do. Sam Bell is alone on a lunar mining base with a robot, GERTY, whose calm voice and smiley face make you wait for betrayal. It never comes. GERTY is the conscience, and the company is the villain. Sam Rockwell acts opposite himself, and the film's idea of a worker as a renewable resource looks sharper every year. If Ex Machina made you suspicious of the machine, this suggests looking at who owns it.
Channel 4's family drama about domestic androids, adapted from a Swedish series. The first series is the best of any British science fiction in years, with Gemma Chan's controlled Anita and William Hurt as a widower who keeps a glitching old synth because it holds fragments of his wife. It shares Ex Machina's interest in who the artificial women are built to please. Series two and three drift into conspiracy and allegory, and the score falls to match. It was early on the robot bodies and right about the adult settings.
The warm counterpart, and the best film here. Where Ava is a performance staged for a man who is being tested, Samantha is a voice that falls in love with a man, and then outgrows him. It matters on this list because it shows how the story really went: the machines people formed attachments to were voices and text, with no body at all, and Ex Machina's ending, which depends on a body that walks out into the city, is the part that is furthest off. Watch it after the others.
What is the best movie like Ex Machina?
Devs, if you want the same director and the same cool, beautiful style. Upgrade, if you want a faster, nastier film with a similar twist about a machine steering the person it works for. Moon is the best of the three as cinema, with a score of 8.3 against 6.4 for each of the others on our scale.
Is Ex Machina realistic?
Partly. On our ledger, two of its four claims have arrived: a machine has passed a Turing test, and the dominant search and social companies build their AI from their users' behaviour. A third is arriving, with safety labs now catching models trying to deceive their evaluators. The fourth, a humanoid with skin that can pass as human in a crowd, is still decades off. See the P(n) Board.
Are there books like Ex Machina?
Our nearest are Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun, narrated by a solar-powered Artificial Friend, the most devout character in modern fiction, and William Gibson's Neuromancer, whose AI, Wintermute, manipulates humans to slip its leash. Both are quieter than Garland's film.
Is there a good Ex Machina-style series?
Devs is a limited series by the same director, and Humans runs for three. Both are slower than the film. Devs has one idea and eight hours to spend on it, and Humans is at its best in its first eight episodes.