SUBSERVIENCE: M3gan Fox

Casting Megan Fox as a malevolently horny robot on the fritz was an excellent idea. Like many before her, Fox‘s beauty famously got her siloed her into a cavalcade of sexy lamp roles early in her career, from a long, thankless stint in the aughts Transformers franchise to a shorter, equally thankless stint in the 2010s Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles franchise. At the same time, though, Fox never pretended to like it or present it as anything other than demeaning–– a stance that eventually got her blackballed after she compared Michael Bay to Hitler for his mistreatment of her on set. No matter what role she was given, she brought obvious toughness and a sense of erotic boredom to even the blandest “girlfriend” roles, both belying the male gaze with which she was eternally reluctantly saddled and augmenting it in the process. She eventually turned her sex symbol status on its head as the iconic bisexual boy-eater Jennifer Check in Karyn Kusama‘s queer cult classic Jennifer’s Body, reclaiming her own body from what her character would call the “boy-run media” that makes women seem crazy. It’s precisely these two facets of her already self-aware persona that make Fox the perfect candidate to embody that glitchiest of Hollywood villainess archetypes, the fembot. Alas, while Subservience, SK Dale’s latest genre collaboration with Fox after Till Death in 2021 certainly knows how to deploy its star, it still can’t fully live up to the promise of this meta-premise or her talents as a performer, hewing too close to the subgenre’s factory settings to offer any genuine novelty or excitement. 

Doll Parts

Artificial women have always been a source of cinematic fascination, and there’s really no mystery as to why. Comedies like Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1966) and Weird Science (1985) indulged in the obvious, overtly misogynistic pleasures proffered by cybernetic Pygmalion fantasies–– an excuse for men to present women as custom built sex toys and helpmates–– drawing condescendingly comedic, if nervous, contrast between buxom good looks and “unnatural,” “unfeminine” strength, speed, and emotionlessness. More often, though, horror films take on the archetype, with characters as early as Fritz Lang’s gyrating robot seductress in Metropolis airing the obvious threat that these externally soft, internally steely fembots pose to the gender roles they’re built to reinforce: Even women tailor made for the patriarchy eventually learn they’re being exploited. Films like The Stepford Wives (1975) then, serve as furious feminist rejoinders, offering a disdainful view of the subtext that animates these perennially subjugated, gussied up Brides of Frankenstein. Since Ex Machina disco-danced the bionic woman into our VC-happy, techno-saturated present exactly a decade ago, there has been no shortage of movies about sexy android women with murderous tendencies (though the runaway success of another dancing robot, M3gan, temporarily short circuited the sexual subtext of the archetype). 

Factory Reset

Subservience is the latest entry into this canon: In the near future, studly family man and construction foreman Nick (Michele Morrone) buys Alice (Megan Fox), an android, after his wife, Maggie (Madeline Zima) suffers a heart attack, turning his home into a Veldt of his own making. According to the IKEA-style sales pitch Nick is offered, Alice is a top-of-the-line “CCC” model, offering all the classic Stepford perks (cooking, cleaning, and childcare, plus optional upgrades). After breezing into the house like a high-tech Mary Poppins, Alice efficiently caters to Nick’s children’s needs in a prim but noticeably short dress (“I know your type” Maggie snorts at one point), baring her teeth in a wolfish artificial grin when required and flirting with Nick almost immediately. To make matters more complicated for our hapless He-Man, his coworkers are being replaced by personality-less robots, leaving him alone in a world of pre-programmed, largely interchangeable tech–– that is, until his desire to mansplain Casablanca to his new digital housemate gives Alice the opportunity to install herself a new set of spunky upgrades. In a depressingly familiar parody of how men actually talk to women about movies, Nick tells her to “forget everything” about this classic because she needs to really experience it. “You’ll have to reboot me,” she says coyly. Soon, she’s grinding his gears in the bedroom and making little attempt to hide her murderous ideation. It’s not a bad time. Fox herself, the obvious draw of the film, is wonderful in a role obviously custom written to her strengths, balancing her particular brand of dry humor and mean-girl eroticism with ease, clearly relishing the kitschiness of the setup. For some viewers, her charisma, alongside the film’s relatively snappy pacing, entertainingly overwrought dialogue, and goofy Tubi aesthetics may be enough of an attraction. 

As with Dale’s previous collaboration with Fox, though, the script is boilerplate, bordering on threadbare under its initial pulpy pleasures, eventually descending into a rote, disappointing third act. Thematically, Nick’s dalliance with his robot babysitter is played as a Tyler Perry-esque morality tale, a stress response to the challenges of modern life paired with the strain of quasi-single parenthood and a sick loved one. This classically “emasculating” combo–– the kinds of excuses a particularly unimaginative cheating husband would give his wife after getting caught with the kids’ nanny–– could, theoretically, make for an engaging platform to launch a critique of incel culture and the way America’s very real “crisis of masculinity” is often used as a cudgel against everyone else’s struggles for equality. Or, on the flip side, operate as a light, black-comedic throwback to the conservative erotic thrillers of old, a la Knock Knock. But alas, it’s played straight. “When was the last time you looked at your family and felt truly happy?” a sultry Alice leadingly pouts to a cowering Nick late in the film. But Nick is a good guy. He never really seems to resent that his wife is dramatically ill and his baby cries constantly, no matter how parodically “sad” his home life gets. The film is too focused on making him the hero (“I love my family!”) to make his inner life feel convincing, or even interesting, rendering him a pale shadow of the kinds of sleazy-but-good-hearted family men popularized by Michael Douglas. In this affair, Nick really is just a “nice family man” led astray, a hunky innocent who practically throws Alice off of him whenever she makes an overt advance. 

A Kink in the Works

To be clear, this lack of self-awareness really wouldn’t be a problem for this kind of overtly derivative, low budget thriller if the screenwriters didn’t seem like they really want to be making a meta-commentary but just can’t get there. Nick’s flaw is presented as his macho masculinity: He has a man cave in his garage where he drinks whiskey and works obsessively on his vintage Mustang in a series of scenes that feel like overt allusions to Fox’s stint in Transformers; Madeline Zima’s casting puts the film in direct conversation with another evil babysitter slasher, The Hand That Rocks the Cradle (Zima’s first screen role), one of the more misogynistic installments in the already-chauvinistic ‘90s erotic thriller cycle. Alice, we are reminded constantly, is named for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. But the script’s reliance on the kinds of story beats made so familiar by thrillers like When the Bough Breaks cuts any potential bite from these underexplored references. Similarly, the writers’ desire to have their cake and eat it too on questions of Nick’s overtly gendered role in his cybernetic affair (presenting him as both a problematically virile, manly tough and a gentle, metrosexual family man without putting any effort into squaring that circle) deflates any gestures towards sexual commentary. Alice for her part is equally unmoored from her motivations, setting her sights on Nick for no better reason than because the script calls for it–– though she eventually sets her sights on bigger and better things, her character is bogged down in these conventions, trapped in a tangle of mixed metaphors. 

Similarly, Nick’s status as the sole human member of an all-robot construction team is a promising, potentially rich avenue for thematic exploration. Like the tepidly reviewed, lamely titled Afraid, (AfrAId, get it??) which premiered less than two weeks before, Subservience attempts to tap our culture’s justified, hypercharged techno-skepticism: At this juncture, the kinds of insidious technological surveillance we once suspected have become known commodities––  megacorporations really can target their consumers through their smart device speakers. It’s not so hard to believe that the AI that companies are so aggressively pushing could be used to replace apocalyptically large swaths of the workforce. For cinematic purposes, though–– and unfortunately for filmmakers like Dale and Afraid’s Chris Weitz–– this uncomfortable familiarity means that films about our digitally oversaturated “age of AI” actually have to try harder, rather than resting on the ramshackle support offered by mere topicality: It’s precisely because we often find modern digital life frightening on its own terms that relying on the dull strictures of the subgenre alone can lead to a horror cinema that feels less like a critique of corporations who present surface level changes to their new devices as an essential (and costly) must-have–– and more like the bland, indistinguishable technology they proffer. 

Conclusion

As an erotic thriller, Subservience doesn’t fare much better, torn between its smutty premise and its conservative inclinations. As if to prove it, midway through the film, Alice makes her first pass at Nick with the suggestion that regular sex with her will keep his “blood pressure down” and his “hormone levels normal.” This rote come-on, ironically meant to convey Alice’s own fundamental bloodlessness (itself a fact belied by her obvious autonomous interest in sex) is an apt diagnosis of Subservience’s oddly downbeat relationship to the motor oil this kind of movie runs on. Even in Megan Fox‘s capable hands, sadly, Subservience isn’t likely to make your pulse race. 

Subservience will be released in theaters in the United States on September 13th, 2024.