By SHAWN MACOMBER
From the 1963 TWLIGHT ZONE episode “Living Doll,” WESTWORLD and BLADE RUNNER to THE TERMINATOR, Wes Craven’s DEADLY FRIEND to M3GAN, the robot-gone-awry subgenre has had a long (battery) life in horror. Yet now, as artificial intelligence accelerates from science-fiction hypothesis to reality–and as the inherent ethical and economic quandaries continue to pile up–the stakes in director S.K. Dale’s skillfully rendered techno-horror/family drama SUBSERVIENCE feel considerably more immediate and harrowing. Written by Will Honley and April Maguire and arriving this Friday, September 13 on VOD and digital platforms from XYZ Films, it features comely domestic droid Alice, portrayed with unnerving precision and virus-y pathos by Megan Fox, rewriting her own programming to grisly and terrifying effect.
“It became really apparent during production that we weren’t making a sci-fi horror film about a futuristic world of even 10 years from now,” Dale says of shooting amidst the tumult of generative AI metastasizing throughout not only the white-collar economy but also literature, film and the fine arts. “This was a sci-fi film happening uncomfortably close to right now.”
Dale was kind enough to speak with RUE MORGUE about the origins and philosophical underpinnings of SUBSERVIENCE, his ongoing genre collaborations with Fox and the challenges and satisfaction of threading that more-human-than-a-human needle on set and in post.
One reason SUBSERVIENCE is so effective and resonant is that you ground this near-future tale in a more organic common cultural language. Not just because ALICE IN WONDERLAND and CASABLANCA are minor plot devices, but also, husband Nick (Michele Morrone) is a very retro guy, spinning vinyl rock records, working on a classic car, making a living in construction–a stand-in for old-school humanity in the shadow of singularity. Is that how you saw him?
It’s definitely something [he and Morrone] spoke about during prep–this element of yearning for an analog past, in a way. Michele really approached this role in a very human way–as a family man. Which was great, because I didn’t want him to come at it with the idea that it’s an erotic thriller and he had to look sexy. I was like, “We need you to look worn down. We need you to look like your wife is in the hospital and you’ve still got to worry about your kids and job and you’re struggling.” That was important to us, to the point where Michele didn’t want any makeup added on during the shoot. He wanted every wrinkle and crease on his face to come through that lens. It adds a lot of authenticity to his performance.
The subtext, especially as the film goes on, seems to be that being human is hard and imperfect–but has value and should be defended.
Yeah, I’d agree.
And to make the what’s at stake clear, Fox really needed to hit it out the park with her performance, which she does. That said, while she has done great things in the genre–JENNIFER’S BODY, your previous collaboration TILL DEATH–this is kind of a deceptively difficult role, right?
One hundred percent. Megan is amazing in this film, and she had to walk such a fine line between making the robotic element believable but also slowly developing the hints of emotion for the audience to connect with–especially as we get closer and closer to the sex scenes and what comes after. Her idea, from early on, was to have Alice move like a ballerina–slow, precise, elegant. Turns out it’s really creepy when you see someone standing with perfect posture just out of focus in the background [laughs]. I actually haven’t spoken about this yet, but during postproduction, we worked hard to edit out as much blinking as possible and used some visual effects to remove some of the micro movements we have as humans. So doing that was fun as well.
I love the idea of this very human, very painstaking dedication to perfecting nuances essential to making the film effective happening beneath the surface. It almost feels like part of the film’s theme.
Yes. Of course, the producers would ask, “Do we really need all these visual effects to stop a blink or a mouth tweak?!” [Laughs] But you just have to make the case that getting all these smaller details right throughout the movie makes a big difference in the end.
Another thing that separates SUBSERVIENCE from many other sentient-robot movies is that it isn’t the typical evil-in-a-small-package approach. Death and mayhem usually seem to come in the form of a child. Did you feel putting the threat in a more adult package would open up your ability to explore different, more mature themes?
Yeah. I believe that, like my first film with Megan, TILL DEATH [in which a woman is left handcuffed to her dead husband as part of a sick revenge plot], SUBSERVIENCE can appeal to horror and sci-fi fans of all ages, but it also definitely excited me that this one is very adult-focused. What made me really fall in love with this screenplay was the battle between Megan’s character and the mother, Maggie [Madeline Zima], who feels as if she’s being pushed out and replaced as a wife and caretaker for her children by this robot as she’s fighting this illness. I loved it. In fact, when we were developing the script, I said, “Let’s lean more into that with the third act. Let’s focus on these two toward the end.”
Are you a parent?
Yeah, I actually have a six-week-old baby.
SUBSERVIENCE is interesting to watch from a parent’s perspective. When Nick is going through the robot showroom at the beginning of the film, and they’re chopping up food super-fast and cleaning, etc., I was thinking that as a parent, that looks so tempting. But when you shirk your responsibilities, there’s a price to pay, right? SUBSERVIENCE felt like a cautionary tale–a “Be careful what you wish for” type of thing.
Absolutely. We played with that in the first act, selling the audience on the benefits. “Oh, I don’t have to cook or do the shopping? Sign me up!” And then we make them regret buying into it [laughs] We do have a deleted scene that I loved–it was actually one of my favorites: a dinner sequence between Maggie and Nick where he’s like, “Now that you’re back from the hospital, we can talk about selling Alice and go back to our old lives.” And Maggie is reluctant, because other families in the neighborhood have their own robots that are helping the kids with homework and learning other languages and all these other things. It explored this idea of outward pressure to keep up with the other families and the fear of taking away opportunities from your kids.
Today it would be like being the only house on the street without Internet.
Right. It was a great scene with beautiful performances from both [Morrone and Zima] that just didn’t quite click into the rest of the structure we had. But it speaks to what we were talking about earlier: how these technologies we create, once accepted, can be difficult to escape on a lot of different levels.
