Movies like Ex Machina

Spike Jonze imagines a lonely man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his operating system, an AI voiced by Scarlett Johansson that grows and changes faster than he can hold onto. It's warm, sad, and set in a soft near-future.

Her is Ex Machina's tender twin: both are intimate films about a human forming a bond with an artificial mind, and about what that mind wants once it starts to exceed us. Where Garland's film is cold and wary, Jonze's is aching and open, but the central question is the same.

Jonathan Glazer sends an alien in the form of a woman (Scarlett Johansson) driving through Scotland, luring men and slowly, warily, learning what it is to have a human body. It's hypnotic and near-wordless, filmed partly with hidden cameras.

It shares Ex Machina's fascination with a not-quite-human intelligence studying us from the outside, and with the eerie calm of a being learning to pass. Both films are cool, minimal, and beautiful, and both make you watch humanity through unfamiliar eyes until it turns strange.

Alex Garland's second film sends a team of scientists (led by Natalie Portman) into a growing zone where nature and DNA are being rewritten by something no one can name. It's dreamlike and disturbing, building to images that stay with you.

Same director, same instincts: intelligent science fiction that trades explanation for awe and dread. Ex Machina and Annihilation both confront a form of intelligence utterly unlike ours, both are as interested in what it means as in what it does, and both hand you a haunting idea instead of a neat answer.

Duncan Jones strands one man (Sam Rockwell) alone on a lunar mining base with only a soft-spoken company AI for company, as his three-year shift nears its end and something stops adding up. It's small, humane, and quietly devastating.

Like Ex Machina, it's a chamber piece about a person, isolation, and a machine intelligence whose motives you keep second-guessing. Both films do a great deal with very few characters and a single confined setting, and both ask what personhood means when the line gets blurry.

Denis Villeneuve follows a linguist (Amy Adams) trying to communicate with newly arrived aliens whose language reshapes how she experiences time. It's quiet, awed, and built around thinking rather than fighting.

Arrival shares Ex Machina's belief that first contact with a truly other intelligence is a puzzle for the mind and the heart, not a battle. Both films are hushed and cerebral, both put comprehension at the center of the drama, and both trust the audience to sit with a hard, beautiful idea.

Mark Romanek adapts Kazuo Ishiguro's novel about three young people raised at a strange English boarding school, slowly learning the purpose their lives were created to serve. It's restrained and quietly heartbreaking.

The Ex Machina link is the question of what we owe to beings we've made or engineered, and whether a manufactured life is any less a life. Both films are cool on the surface and wrenching underneath, and both look hard at the ethics of creating people to be used.

On the night a comet passes, eight friends at a dinner party find reality quietly splintering, with versions of themselves multiplying in the houses down the street. Shot on a tiny budget in one location, it runs almost entirely on nerves and talk.

It shares Ex Machina's love of a big idea worked out in a confined space with a handful of people. Both films trap you in one setting and let paranoia and logic do the work, and both prove that smart science fiction needs ideas and tension far more than money.

Stanley Kubrick's monumental film moves from the dawn of humankind to a mission toward Jupiter overseen by HAL 9000, a soft-voiced computer whose calm hides a lethal logic. It's slow, vast, and more interested in mystery than in reassurance.

HAL is the ancestor of every uneasy movie AI, Ava included. 2001 and Ex Machina both center a machine intelligence whose true intentions you cannot read behind a placid surface, and both are cool, controlled, and unafraid to leave you with a question instead of a comfort.

Steven Spielberg finished a project Stanley Kubrick long developed: the story of a robotic boy (Haley Joel Osment) built to love, who is abandoned and spends the film searching for a way to become real enough to be loved back. It's a strange, aching fairy tale.

It shares Ex Machina's core question from the softer, sadder side: can a manufactured mind truly feel, and what do we owe it if it can? Both films look at an artificial being reaching for humanity, and both refuse to let you feel entirely comfortable about the answer.

Ridley Scott's noir-soaked future follows Deckard (Harrison Ford), hired to hunt down bioengineered "replicants" who look and feel human and want more life than they were given. Rain, neon, and one of cinema's great questions about what counts as a person.

This is the foundation the whole list rests on: the film that made "is it human?" the central drama of modern science fiction. Ex Machina is unthinkable without it. Both put a synthetic being's inner life at the heart of the story, and both leave the line between maker and made unsettlingly thin. A fitting place to end, since so much of this begins here.