Well, we've all seen movies and TV series like Subservience before, in which a beautiful female android ingratiates herself with a human family, and some kind of terror ensues. I'm sure there were plot lines like that in Humans and lots of other films and series. But I have to say, Subservience kept me interested, because I really wasn't sure just how it would end.
What it is has going for it, in addition to a somewhat original plot, was good acting by Madeline Zima as the human wife. I've seen her before in Californication, Twin Peaks, You, and Bombshell. Subservience is the biggest role I've seen her in so far, and she's up for the part.
Megan Fox plays the female android. She's been in lots of movies that I haven't seen, and she does a good job in Subservience, too. But she runs into a paradox of sorts, or something like a paradox, any time a human being plays an android -- she's very convincing in her mix of robotic stiffness and human emotions because, of course, she the actress is a human being herself. I first actually noticed this decades ago with Brent Spiner's performance as Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation. His character is an android who more than anything else yearns to be human, and in that yearning certainly seems human, precisely because Brent Spiner is also a human being himself. I suppose the only way movie-makers will ever totally surmount this paradox is when we already have androids in our midst and some of them are actors. The principle here would be: it takes a real android to really convincingly play an android -- and the reason why Brent Spiner and Megan Fox work so well in my estimation as androids is we don't yet have anything approaching real androids outside of science fiction and in our midst. At least, as far as we know.
Back to Subservience, it's well situated in some Nordic, cold future, whether because of climate change or it's just winter, who knows. (I guess not climate change because that would make things warmer.) Little kids in the human family play a good role -- actually, a little girl, and a younger little boy who's a toddler -- and there are some nice touches of human laborers being put out of work and androids being helpful in hospitals. Both of these we've seen before, too, but they're well done in Subservience.
There may be a sequel. If so, I'll watch and review it. In the meantime, it's a movie that also connects, at least now in North America, because it's getting pretty cold outside for real.
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Hey, here's a little poem I just had poem I just had published: "I Fell in Love with a Robot"
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