Film Review - Subservience
Images courtesy of Rialto Distribution.
Who'd have thought M3GAN, of all movies, would go on to inspire such a wave of artless replicants? Just last month we had Blumhouse's AFRAID (being the producers of M3GAN, at least they were merely self-plagiarising), and now we have SK Dale’s direct-to-streaming suckfest Subservience, that dares to ask the brave question “what if we made the robot… sexy?” Throw in Michele Morrone of Netflix's horny stockholm syndrome thriller 365 Days, a half-naked Megan Fox, and more clichés and loose threads than you can shake a stick at, and what do you get? Nachos! And a few too many rhetorical questions in an opening paragraph!!
Except we forgot to buy any toppings, so all we've got left is a bowl full of microwaved corn chips, graciously adorned with the final dregs of a bag of shredded cheese, and maybe half a teaspoon of leftover sour cream.
Everyman Nick (Morrone) works as a builder on a new highrise. Having to take care of his daughter alone while his wife’s in hospital awaiting a heart transplant, he winds up hiring an advanced robot maid (Fox), oddly enough at his daughter Isla's request - who later calls her Alice after Alice in Wonderland. Of course things take a turn when Nick instructs Alice to erase all memory of Casablanca so she can watch it with him through fresh eyes, and she sneakily erases a little more than that. It's ironic that, although Nick insists the film be experienced on a human level, the film we're currently watching would probably be more engaging as a Wikipedia synopsis. Much like the aforementioned snack, Subservience is severely lacking in spice. Yes, there are scenes of M3gan Fox in an all-white lingerie piece that's meant to evoke a future tech aesthetic, but the script is so flaccid that any would-be sparks - funnily enough, the in-universe slur for the robots - fail to fly.
Where sci-fi films are generally known for being intellectually stimulating, this one's about as intelligent as a toaster with a wi-fi connection. During an early interaction, Alice tells Isla that the reason she doesn't need to brush her teeth is because Alice has an ultraviolet lamp in her mouth that destroys any bacteria, and then promptly displays this feature by beaming this highly powerful light directly into Isla’s retina. We later witness a group of medically trained robots performing surgery, all of whom have no mouths, presumably to rid the need for surgical masks - even though we've just been told that the regular sparks have bacteria-free mouths.
It's frankly disappointing to learn that director SK Dale's previous film was the far better Megan-Fox-covered-in-blood Till Death, a nifty little thriller that actually gave Fox some material to actually, you know, act with. Instead, Subservience seems to merely exist to show off her body, delivering surprisingly little in the way of pulpy thrills, despite a premise ripe with campy potential. I'd make a joke about the film feeling like it was written by AI, but if that were the case, at least it could've programmed in a better ending.
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Subservience is available to rent or buy on all major platforms now. For more info, click here.