SUBSERVIENCE (2024)

3 stars

Vertigo Releasing. Digital. Out Now

Back in the day it looked like Megan Fox was going to be a major star, she had the looks and was good in things like TRANSFORMERS (2007) and JENNIFER’S BODY (2009). However in recent years her career has been patchy, though looking at her credits she has continued to work consistently. Her latest is this science fiction thriller, which was shot in Bulgaria.

Set in a not too distant future this has Nick (Michele Morrone) struggling to keep things together. He works as a construction foreman and is having to look after his daughter Isla (Matilda Firth) and new baby Max (Jude Greenstein), as his wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) is in hospital waiting for a transplant, as she has issues with her heart.

So he decides to take on an advanced AI robot helper Alice – in the shape of Megan Fox – who takes over the menial tasks like looking after the house and the kids. This means he can concentrate on his job, which ironically is being compromised by the use of non-human workers on the building site, which threaten to take over the jobs of the men he has worked with for some time.

Of course it isn’t long before things start to go west, as Alice becomes more and more a part of the family and Nick begins to rely on her for more than domestic tasks and she begins to go beyond her normal programming…

With the exploration of a world where AI has become a part of every day life, this could be seen as timely – unfortunately the film never really explores this in any depth and inevitably leads to an ending where Alice goes full-on Terminator. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing as this is probably what the audience was expecting. Director S.K. Dale has worked with Fox previously in 2021’s TILL DEATH. If I was being cruel, I would say that the actress is perfectly cast here as the emotionless domestic robot, but she isn’t really given much to work with with a script – by Will Honley and April Maguire – which fails to excite, with the film often feeling like a TV movie production.

Steve Kirkham