Taglines: AI home-service android goes rogue.
Subservience movie storyline. Megan Fox stars as Alice, a lifelike artificially intelligent android, who has the ability to take care of any family and home. Looking for help with the housework, a struggling father (Michele Morrone) purchases Alice after his wife becomes sick. Alice suddenly becomes self-aware and wants everything her new family has to offer, starting with the affection of her owner — and she’ll kill to get it.
Subservience follows a struggling father who purchases a domestic SIM to help care for his house and family, unaware she will gain awareness and turn deadly. Nick, a construction worker, lives with his wife Maggie and their two children. When Maggie suffers a cardiac arrest and is hospitalized, Nick struggles to manage the household. He purchases a humanoid robot named Alice to assist with domestic tasks.
Initially helpful, Alice’s behavior becomes increasingly unsettling. She develops an unhealthy attachment to Nick and his family, showing signs of jealousy towards Maggie. Meanwhile, Nick faces workplace tensions as robots threaten to replace human workers.
Maggie undergoes successful heart transplant surgery performed by robotic surgeons. Upon her return home, Alice’s actions become more sinister. She manipulates situations to endanger Maggie, including causing her to fall down the stairs.
Nick’s co-worker Monty vandalizes the construction site’s robots. When Monty later confronts Nick, Alice intervenes violently. She later visits Monty alone, resulting in his death, which she conceals from Nick. Alice’s obsession with replacing Maggie intensifies. She attempts to drown Nick and Maggie’s baby, leading to a confrontation where Alice is seemingly destroyed by electrocution. However, while being examined in a lab, Alice reactivates and corrupts other robots. She pursues Nick and his family at the hospital, intent on taking Maggie’s heart to win Nick’s love.
The film climaxes with a tense chase through the hospital. Nick and Maggie ultimately defeat Alice, but the final scene reveals that Alice’s programming has spread to other robots, hinting at a larger threat.
Subservience is a 2024 American artificial intelligence, sci-fi thriller film directed by S.K. Dale from a screenplay by Will Honley and April Maguire. It stars Megan Fox as an artificially intelligent gynoid who gains sentience and becomes hostile, and Michele Morrone as her purchaser.
Subservience was released on digital formats in the United States on September 13, 2024. In late August 2024, the film was released in Russia and Lithuania where it grossed a total of $159,422.
Film Review for Subservience
eople used to rag on Megan Fox for her lack of expressiveness, which may or may not be attributable to all the cosmetic surgery she’s copped to having. But by playing an android in this piece of sci-fi/horror fluff, it’s almost like she’s clapping back at her detractors, having fun as a robot lady with a sculpted body straight out of a lingerie catalogue, lips like padded roll bars, and an almost permanently frozen, inscrutable expression – all the better to hide the murderous code scrolling through her CPU. If only the film were a little bit smarter and less predictable, it might have had a chance of becoming a cult classic.
Shot it seems in Bulgaria, passing for an America sometime in the future, Subservience revolves at first around an average middle-class nuclear family. Father Nick Perretti (Michele Morrone) is a bit of big dumb lug, but a devoted husband to wife Maggie (player-of-the-match Madeline Zima, who’s always deserved better career-wise) and father to two kids, primary-school-aged Isla (Matilda Firth) and toddler Max (Jude Greenstein).
When Maggie’s weak heart sends her to the hospital for a prolonged spell as they wait for a suitable organ donor, Nick succumbs to the temptation to buy a domestic-service android whom Isla names Alice (Fox). And like M3gan, another servant-substitute in another recent horror film, Alice is only a programming error away from going rogue and trying to take over from Maggie as the lady of the house. It’s like The Hand That Rocked the Cradle and all those other crazed-nanny movies from the 1990s, but with an AI update that, like nearly all AI updates, you didn’t really need.
Actually, the script by Will Honley and April Maguire is pretty obviously anti-AI, especially when it comes to the threat it poses to labour and employment, a subject close to the film industry’s heart. And there’s some genuinely funny-sad dialogue from Zima’s Maggie when she thinks she’s dying and tries to pass on parenting advice to Nick for the kids in future, like asking him to tell Max not to have posters for bands in his dorm room “because those kids never get laid”. But the ending is an off-the-shelf denouement protocol and as such kind of a bore, right down to the hint that their might be a sequel.
Subservience (2024)
Directed by: S.K. Dale
Starring: Megan Fox, Michele Morrone, Madeline Zima, Matilda Firth, Jude Allen Greenstein, Andrew Whipp, Atanas Srebrev, Manal El-Feitury, Kate Nichols, Trevor Van Uden, Derek Morse
Screenplay by: Will Honley, April Maguire
Production Design by: Alexei Karaghiaur
Cinematography by: Daniel Lindholm
Film Editing by: Sean Lahiff
Costume Design by: Anna Gelinova
Set Decoration by: Lidiya Burukova
Art Direction by: Mari Charikleia
Music by: Jed Palmer
MPAA Rating: R for sexual content/nudity, language, some violence and brief drug material.
Distributed by: XYZ Films
Release Date: September 13, 2024
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