(This article contains spoilers)

At the end of The Imitation Game, a title card helpfully reminds viewers of the upshot of Alan Turing’s World War II-era mechanical inventions: “today, we call them computers.” The new thriller Ex Machina reflects this legacy from a different angle, depicting a present tense where a computer—or more specifically, a single, phenomenally advanced artificial intelligence unit—feels empowered to call itself human.

Arriving at the secluded mountainside laboratory-slash-luxury retreat of his jet-setting, web-coding, Internet magnate employer Nathan—Oscar Isaac as an amusing hybrid of Mark Zuckerberg and James Bond villain—Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson) is surprised to learn that he’s been selected as the “human component” in an old-fashioned Turing test. The subject of his questions is Ava (Alicia Vikander), an A.I. prototype whose beauteously human countenance is betrayed by visible signs of her high-tech engineering. Her limpid eyes are offset by a transparent torso: the ultimate in midriff baring fashion statements.

Already a critical hit in director Alex Garland’s native Britain, Ex Machina stands poised to be one of the scrupulously analyzed movies of the year, from its expressly mythological undergirding—Isaac’s character is a clear Bluebeard manqué with exoskeletons in his closet—to its slickly manufactured chassis: there hasn’t been a high-concept science-fiction film this carefully framed and color-coded since Blade Runner (1982). Ridley Scott’s tech-noir landmark was obviously major influence on Garland’s script, which pivots on similar questions of sentience, albeit with a somewhat opposite perspective. The (ostensible) emotional hook of Blade Runner is the Replicants’ desultory acceptance of their foreshortened existences—the idea that their heightened strength and abilities come at the expense of durability. Ava, though, has a different problem. If she could get out into the world, she could probably pass for human indefinitely, but her creator keeps her under lock and key—she’s a like a mechanical owl in a gilded cage.

Vikander, a Swedish actress whose lissome physicality surely served her well in her earlier career as a ballerina, plays Ava with the graceful but slightly unsettling comportment of somebody trying to “act natural.” The film’s ingenious special-effects, which subtly carve away parts of her body and overlay them with gleaming robotic textures, thus complete a complicated illusion (for the audience) that the character tries to undo; in the best-conceived sequence, Ava models a modest springtime ensemble for Caleb that disguises her moving parts except for a thin strip of circuits around her neck—her actual bodily material suddenly reconfigured perceptually as a fetching accessory. One of Garland’s goals in Ex Machina seems to be to have the final word in the cinematic history of humanoid robots stretching back to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)whose iconic maschinenmensch, embodied by the German actress Brigitte Helm, is the first iteration of the alternately fetishized and degraded archetype of the “fembot”—the automaton with a strategically seductive exterior.

Ex Machina does lay the symbolism on a little thick, starting with Ava’s Biblically alliteratively name (swap the A’s for E’s and the conspicuously Edenic scenery outside the lab clicks into place) butin this, it merely updates Metropolis, which figures Helm’s character as an avatar of the Whore of Babylon—the steely trollop who leads an entire oppressed male cohort into temptation. Lang’s mad scientist Rotwang (Rudolf Klein-Rogge) is coerced into giving his creation an attractive human face (the visage of his dead lover, Hel) to infiltrate and influence the rank-and-file workers who are meant to mistake her for the heroic activist Maria (Helm as well). The idea of Woman as Other—a locus of fear and desire—has rarely been so explicitly inscribed onscreen as in Metropolis, with its money shot of Helm’s face being photographically superimposed over the metal slab of the robot’s head. Metropolis’ grim vision of an industrialized society literally feeding its laborers into the maw of an insatiable moloch hasn’t lost its power over time, and neither has the image of the ersatz Maria as the ultimate double agent—a scheming antecedent of Mata Hari who’s hiding more than just a sinister agenda behind her angelic features.

The word “fembot” was first connected to a group of shapely villainesses who menaced Jamie Summers (Lindsay Wagner) on the 70s syndication hit The Bionic Woman; it was then taken up by Austin Powers (Mike Myers) in the eponymous series of spy spoofs, which routinely featured scantily clad girls who “shoot smoke out of their jumblies” (including, inevitably, Britney Spears in a self-deprecating cameo). Ira Levin’s brilliant pulp novel The Stepford Wives, which was made into a mediocre movie by Bryan Forbes, stands as the satirical apotheosis of the “fembot” conceit; it imagines an isolated community whose male leaders have replaced their wives with clockwork copies whose consciousnesses can’t be raised by the gender-equality rhetoric percolating in American society. As he did in Rosemary’s Baby, Levin slyly links feminism and paranoia, suggesting that, if anything, the attitudes of the Simone de Beauvoir-influenced second wavers aren’t nearly radical enough to combat a masculine conspiracy that seeks to literally reduce women to mute pleasure units.

It’s worth noting that in films featuring male-identified robots—like Westworld (1973) and The Terminator (1984)—the physical attractiveness of the characters’ outer forms are incidental and unremarked upon; Jamie Summers’ “bionic” predecessor Steve Austin (Lee Majors) never had his six-million dollar body shoved into cute little outfits to pass as a cocktail lounge performer or trapeze artist, for instance. In Blade Runner, Pris (Daryl Hannah) is presented as a gyrating, somersaulting sex object, while Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty gets to wax poetic and die nobly. However erotic his presence may be—especially as compared to Harrison Ford—he’s never gawked at in the same way as his distaff companions.

Godard famously said that the cinema is the history of boys photographing girls, an imbalanced power dynamic which would seem to hold true for faux-females as well. The one recent science-fiction film that appearsto be staging an intervention of sorts would be Spike Jonze’s Her (2013), another obvious point of reference for Ex Machina, except that its central AI, Samantha, is only experienced by the other characters—and the audience—as a disembodied voice (played by Scarlett Johannson). Sam’s physical appearance is a non-issue, but of course Jonze gets to have it both ways, since Johansson is one of the most distinctive actresses in American movies; her honeyed line readings evoke her cover-girl looks, and assure us that if Samantha did have a body, it would be a more than presentable one. (Consider the difference here with 2001: A Space Odyssey [1968] which cast the unknown Douglas Rain as the chatty Hal 9000). That Her also arguably indulges in a retrograde idea of male-female relationships—with the artificial woman rendered so ephemeral that her human “lover” is reduced to bemoaning her inherent, unknowable mystery—is a matter for another essay, perhaps, but however skillful and affecting Johannson’s vocal performance is, the role (like Samantha herself) is something that feels custom-made for the desires of a male spectator.

Ex Machina gives this an interesting twist with the late revelation that Ava has to some extent been designed with her smitten interlocutor in mind: not her personality, but her appearance, which was derived from data-mining Caleb’s web browser (including his search history for pornography). The most baldly provocative aspect of Garland’s film is the way it doubles down on the iconography of fembots: Isaac’s mad scientist has a live-in assistant, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuna). whose silent, docile persona and statuesque body mark her as a kind of Stepford Concubine, an allusion that pays off in a pair of superbly well-staged sequences, one oddly comic and the other impressively grotesque. At another point, the two women in the cast have a silent, sensual encounter, which definitely seems gratuitous (Ava aces the Turing Test but can’t pass the Bechdel Test) except that Garland is too cleverly self-aware to be written off as a mere nerdy pervert. Nathan’s fetishistic insistence on producing A.I.s that look like runway models (and which have the capability to be penetrated sexually) is not a harmless eccentricity but rather the clearest indicator of his warped morality: Bluebeard may have imprisoned and executed his wives, but he didn’t build them to be sacrificial lambs in the first place.

That Ex Machina never quite convinces as to why Nathan would invite a possibly volatile third party to upset his little domestic terrarium when he already knows that Ava would ace any version of the Turing Test is one of its flaws. But the set-up is necessary for the points that Garland is trying to score on the male characters, and also their equivalents in the audience. He knows that all parties are too mesmerized by Ava/Vikander’s impeccable surfaces to really worry about the faulty wiring underneath. There’s something pat about Ex Machina (beginning with its title, which refers to an ancient dramatic tradition of extreme contrivance), but at the same time, the way it interrogates imagery and ideas that several decades’ worth of science-fiction films have casually taken for granted makes it an outlier of sorts: if not an advanced model then at least a version with updated software.