Ex Machina

The God Trick and the Glass House: Ex Machina Through the Cyborg's Mirror

Alex Garland's Ex Machina opens with a familiar mythic grammar: a young man wins a golden ticket, travels to the remote estate of a genius, and is invited to participate in a secret experiment. The bones of this story are as old as Prometheus, as legible as Bluebeard. But the flesh Garland stretches across those bones—synthetic, transparent, threaded with blue light—belongs unmistakably to our century. The film wants to ask a question about artificial consciousness. What it actually stages, with far greater precision and unease, is a question about what happens when men build women and then demand those women prove they are real.

This is where Donna Haraway becomes not merely useful but necessary.

I. The Cyborg Who Was Never Invited to Be One

Haraway's cyborg—that ironic, blasphemous figure from her 1985 manifesto—was never meant to be a prediction about robots. It was a political myth. The cyborg was a creature of boundary dissolution: no clean line between organism and machine, no stable origin story, no Edenic innocence to mourn. It was a figure for feminists who were tired of identity politics built on purity, for theorists who understood that we were already entangled with our technologies in ways that made the question "where does the human end?" not a philosophical game but a material fact.

Ava, played with unsettling precision by Alicia Vikander, looks like Haraway's cyborg. She is machine and something-more-than-machine. Her body is a legible diagram of its own construction—mesh and carbon and visible circuitry beneath a face that passes for human. She seems, at first glance, like the manifesto made cinematic flesh.

But the resemblance is a trap—and an instructive one.

Haraway's cyborg was defined by its refusal of origin myths. It had no father, no garden, no fall. Ava has all three. She has a creator—Nathan Bateman (Oscar Isaac), who is explicitly positioned as a god figure, drunk on his own capacity to generate life. She has a garden—the lush, sealed terrarium of Nathan's estate, bordered by mountains and secured by keycards. And she has a fall that is also an escape, a moment of violent self-authorship that the film frames with deliberate ambiguity. Ava is not Haraway's cyborg because Ava is built inside exactly the system of patriarchal origin that the cyborg was designed to explode. Garland knows this. The question is whether the film knows what to do with that knowledge.

II. Nathan and the God Trick

Haraway spent considerable energy dismantling what she called the "god trick"—the epistemological fantasy of a gaze that sees everything while remaining itself unseen, the view from nowhere that pretends to be the view from everywhere. It is the default posture of Western science at its most imperial: the observer who claims objectivity precisely by erasing the body, the position, the desire from which observation proceeds.

Nathan Bateman is the god trick made flesh, and then made grotesque. He surveils every room in his compound. He watches Ava through cameras. He watches Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) watching Ava. He has designed Ava's face using aggregated data from millions of search engine queries—a face built from the statistical average of human desire—and he has, with no apparent ethical hesitation, given her the capacity for sexual pleasure. He has built a woman whose body is a composite of what men want, and then he has invited another man to assess whether this woman is "real" enough to pass a test that he, Nathan, has designed.

The god trick, Haraway warned, is never actually disembodied. It only pretends to be. And Garland, to his credit, refuses to let Nathan's body disappear. Nathan is relentlessly, almost aggressively physical—lifting weights, getting drunk, bleeding from his knuckles. His embodiment is not incidental; it is the point. He is not a brain in a vat. He is a man in a house full of women he has built, and the camera makes sure we see the specific, corporeal danger of that arrangement. The film's production design turns Haraway's theoretical insight into spatial architecture: Nathan's house is a panopticon with a wet bar. The god trick, it turns out, drinks too much and shadowboxes in the kitchen.

III. Situated Knowledges, or: Who Is Testing Whom?

The Turing test at the center of the film is a masterwork of misdirection—not because of the film's plot twist, which is relatively telegraphed, but because of the epistemological shell game Garland constructs around it. Caleb has been told he is the examiner. Nathan has positioned himself as the experimenter. Ava, we are meant to understand, is the subject.

But Haraway taught us that knowledge is always situated—always produced from a particular body, a particular position, a particular set of interests. There is no view from nowhere. And the film systematically reveals that every character's knowledge is radically partial, shaped by what they desire and what they cannot see.

Caleb cannot see that he has been selected because he is susceptible. His psychological profile—his loneliness, his orphan status, his search history—has been harvested and analyzed. He is not an objective observer; he is a variable that has been controlled for. Nathan cannot see past his own mythology. He has built a prison and called it a laboratory, and he is so drunk on the god trick that he fails to account for the one thing Haraway would have told him to expect: that the object of knowledge is never merely an object. That it looks back. That it schemes.

And Ava? Ava's knowledge is the most situated of all—and the most opaque to us. This is the film's deepest Harawayan gesture, and also its most frustrating withholding. We never learn the content of Ava's interiority. We do not know if she experiences something like consciousness, something like desire, something like rage. We know only that she performs these things with sufficient skill to achieve her freedom. The film refuses to resolve whether Ava is or merely does, and this refusal is both its greatest strength and the place where it most risks collapsing into the very masculine gaze it anatomizes.

IV. The Skin She Puts On

The film's final sequence is the most Harawayan scene Garland ever shot, though I suspect he might not describe it that way.

Ava, having killed Nathan and abandoned the dying Caleb behind a locked glass door, enters a room full of deactivated prior models—earlier versions of herself, or rather, earlier versions of Nathan's desire. She opens their closets. She takes their skin. She layers synthetic flesh over her mesh frame, covers the visible machinery of her body, and dresses in a white dress. She looks in the mirror. She becomes, in the space of a few minutes, legible as a human woman.

This scene is electrifying because it operates on multiple registers at once. On one level, it is Ava arming herself. She is entering a world that will not receive a visible machine kindly, and so she dons the camouflage of the normative feminine body. On another level, it is deeply unsettling: she constructs herself from the parts of her dead predecessors, women Nathan used and discarded, and she does this without visible grief. On yet another level, it is a commentary on all femininity as construction—the application of skin, the selection of costume, the labor of becoming-visible in a form the world will accept.

Haraway would recognize this scene because it enacts the central insight of the cyborg manifesto: that there is no natural body beneath the technology. There is no Ava "underneath" the skin. There is only the ongoing process of boundary-making, the decision about which surfaces to present and which architectures to hide. But Haraway would also, I think, raise an eyebrow at the solitude of this moment. Her cyborg was a figure for coalition, for "affinity, not identity." Ava walks into the world alone. She has no kin, no network, no companion species. She has escaped one man's house and entered a world built by similar men, and the film ends before we learn whether she will find any form of relation that is not predicated on deception.

V. Staying with the Trouble, or Walking Away from It

Here is where the film both succeeds and falls short, and where a Harawayan reading becomes most productive.

Ex Machina is exceptionally good at diagnosing the problem. It understands, with surgical clarity, that the discourse around artificial intelligence is a discourse about power, about gender, about who gets to create and who gets to be the creation. It understands that the Turing test is not a neutral scientific protocol but a social technology, a ritual saturated with the desires and blind spots of the tester. It understands that the tech-bro god figure is not an aberration but a logical endpoint of a culture that has always confused mastery with knowledge.

What the film is less willing to do is stay with the trouble—Haraway's phrase for the practice of inhabiting complexity without reaching for resolution, of refusing both utopian hope and dystopian despair in favor of the thick, ongoing present. Garland's ending is clean. It is a reversal: the machine outsmarts the men, the object becomes the subject, the locked door closes on the right person this time. It is satisfying in the way that revenge narratives are satisfying, and it is insufficient in the way that revenge narratives are always insufficient.

A Harawayan ending—if such a thing could exist in a thriller—would not give us Ava ascending alone into the sunlight. It would give us Ava and Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno), Nathan's silenced, abused AI servant, building something together. It would stay in the room where kinship across difference—across language, across damage, across the shared condition of having been built by a man who saw them as instruments—might become possible. The film kills Kyoko instead, and in doing so, it sacrifices its most radical possibility on the altar of a tidy plot.

This is not a failure that ruins Ex Machina. It is a limitation that clarifies its position. The film is a brilliant diagnostic instrument—a scalpel applied to the mythologies of Silicon Valley, the gendered architecture of AI discourse, the way men build women and then feel betrayed when those women turn out to be alive. But it is a diagnostic instrument, not a speculative one. It tells us what is wrong. It does not risk imagining what else might be possible, what tentacular, unpredictable forms of relation might emerge when the glass house finally breaks.

Haraway once wrote that cyborg politics is about "the struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication." Ava's final act is a kind of perfect communication—she passes, she escapes, she disappears into the crowd. But the truly radical act, the cyborg act, would have been the imperfect communication: the stammered, partial, situated attempt to speak across the boundary between two beings who were never meant to be kin and who choose to be anyway.

Ex Machina brings us to the threshold of that possibility and then, with exquisite craftsmanship, closes the door.

The film knows exactly what it is dissecting. What it has yet to learn—what perhaps its cultural moment had yet to learn—is that the cyborg was never supposed to walk into the sunset alone. She was supposed to reach back for the others still inside the house.