by Jason Adams
Is Alex Garland's Ex Machina a horror film? For all of its Frankensteinian elements I could be swayed towards a yes or a no, but when it comes to viewing the film via Sonoya Mizuno's character of "Kyoko" -- Mizuno can currently be seen co-starring on Garland's Hulu show Devs -- the "yes" argument feels substantive and then some...
There's an entire silent side-movie that plays along the main narrative that involves her character, one that only seems to expose itself, like so much surprise cyborg wiring, in the last act, too late.
It's nearly half an hour into the film when Kyoko first appears, her hand ghost-like on a plane of frosted glass -- Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) has already been inside tech billionaire Caleb's (Oscar Isaac) future-lair for an entire day when Kyoko materializes in his bedroom as he lay sleeping, the threesome (along with Alicia Vikander's cyborg Ava) he thought he was experiencing suddenly becoming a fourway. "She's some alarm clock; gets you right up" is how Caleb lewdly describes her, and Kyoko's silence, her seeming compliance, immediately becomes a new shroud of mystery hanging over this strange space.
Having met Vikander's half-finished cyborg first, her body a silver whirr of exposed mechanics, seems to paint Kyoko, seen second, as an actual human being. She is seemingly complete to the naked eye, save her inability to speak... something neither of the men seem too concerned over. She seems to be merely Caleb's pre-MeToo sexualized servant and assistant, a TechBro dream made flesh -- if you're rich enough you too could have your own Kyoko, delivering you a breakfast tray in bed wearing a sleek stewardess uniform, silent as the tomb.
And yet the film and Mizuno's performance, ever coy, skirts and misdirects on the substance of her presence, making of her the unexpected fourth leg of a stool that calls its entire soundness, its security, into question. She's there unremarked upon during Oscar Isaac's infamous dance routine, matching him beat for beat, a metronome, a wind-up toy snapped to attention. Oh she can move, and how. Too bad for Caleb, soon enough, once somebody not him makes that how work for them.