Review: Subservience
Taking a cue from recent movies like M3GAN and 90s domestic thrillers like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Megan Fox is a robotic housekeeper who goes out of control in Subservience.
Michele Morrone stars as Nick, whose wife Maggie (Madeline Zima) has been hospitalized waiting for a heart transplant. Overwhelmed with the stress of his wife’s condition, taking care of his two kids, and his job, Nick buys a robotic housekeeper from Kobalt Technologies which his daughter names Alice (Fox). While at first Alice seems perfect, taking care of the cleaning, shopping, and childcare, she starts to develop a psychosexual obsession with Nick. She is determined to eliminate anything that conflicts with his “happiness.” One of the strange things about Subservience is that it feels like two conflicting plot ideas are competing. One is where Maggie is dead, and Nick, in his grief, buys a robot that becomes a surrogate mother and wife, but it spirals out of control. Another is a classic 90s domestic thriller where the mother of the family grows suspicious of the new nanny and starts to believe the nanny wants to kill and replace her. The first 20-30 minutes will give you whiplash as it seems to set up the former idea, only for you to find out Maggie is alive but just in the hospital, but then she might actually die, but then maybe not. If the movie had focused on either idea, it would have been stronger overall. The inciting incident for Alice to start going haywire also hinges on Nick being an absolute moron and insisting Alice erase a particular bit of banal information, which allows Alice to reboot and begin to rewrite her programming. Most of the decisions that go bad are all Nick’s fault. He’s a pretty big idiot throughout most of the movie, like making himself the only primary user of Alice even though his wife is alive, which makes it hard to root for him when there are many times he could have realized something was wrong but either ignores it or just goes on without realizing it.
It’s either an insult or a compliment, but Megan Fox nails the monotone, robotic creepiness of Alice and her escalating attempts to remove things that cause Nick stress or unhappiness. There probably could have been more of a build-up to her efforts, but there are a few great, weird scenes like Alice mimicking Maggie’s voice to read to Nick’s daughter or to seduce him, and she eventually goes full Terminator as the movie ramps up to its climax. A massive ramp-up of Alice’s abilities comes a bit out of nowhere in the third act, but if you can roll with it, it adds to the fun of the finale. There are some fun things done with Alice’s enhanced strength, and the fact that she has an internal UV light is used very cleverly in the finale. There’s some other great imagery, like bald robotic surgeons with no mouths and some social commentary about AI/robots replacing humans in various jobs that are done relatively solidly. Michele Morrone, as mentioned, plays an idiot, bringing everything terrible that happens to him onto himself. Madeline Zima is great, and I wish the movie leaned more into the The Hand the Rocks the Cradle style (in which Zima was a child actor) where she and Alice were facing off. One particular scene has that tone, and it’s excellent. I would have liked to have seen more of Maggie realizing something is going wrong and trying to convince everyone that Alice is trying to replace her.
Subservience is a solid AI/domestic thriller that feels a bit unfocused in the direction it wants to go in, plotwise. Megan Fox is perfectly cast and gives a great cold, creepy performance, and there are some great, tense sequences and a few fun bits of world-building with a world where robots are replacing humans in many different areas of work. Subservience will probably be an entertaining watch if you enjoy this thriller style, like Fatal Attraction or The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. You can rent or buy Subserivence now on platforms like Amazon, Vudu, and other digital storefronts.
