How is ‘Ex Machina inspired by Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula’?
Before Alex Garland established himself as a prominent filmmaker in the contemporary landscape, he had already attracted a lot of attention for his writing. Having penned acclaimed screenplays such as 28 Days Later, as well as multiple novels, Garland gained momentum in the world of cinema before making his directorial debut in 2014. Titled Ex Machina, it proved to be one of the most interesting sci-fi films of the last decade.
Since then, Garland has directed other projects like Annihilation and the much-maligned Men, but he has failed to capture audiences as he did with Ex Machina. In the film, Domhnall Gleeson plays the role of a computer programmer who is invited by his CEO (Oscar Isaac) to evaluate whether his AI robot named Ava (Alicia Vikander) possesses some form of consciousness. At a time when artificial intelligence was (and continues to be) a source of constant anxiety for a lot of people, Garland attempted to deconstruct its impenetrable mythos.
During a conversation with NPR, Garland revealed: I just got very interested in the area of artificial intelligence and, in particular, how it relates to human consciousness because it’s about what we value about each other. It’s primarily our minds, you know, that’s what we interact with, and it’s what we respect about each other… And I could see that there was a lot of anxiety floating around about AIs. And I wanted to address it partly because I thought it was misplaced.”
The filmmaker also noted: “The trick of the film, the way that the film intends to work, is to present something which is unambiguously a machine and then gradually remove your sense of Ava being a machine, even while you continue to see her being that way. And the sound design is a key part of that. You can hear… the sounds of the bits of machinery moving, which aren’t specified. They’re not quite gears and cogs and pistons, they’re something slightly odder than that. And there’s also this pulse which is not dissimilar in some respects to a heartbeat, although it isn’t a heartbeat.”
Raising questions about the posthuman condition, Ex Machina draws obvious parallels to the story of Frankenstein and his monster. However, the narrative of the film also features a lot of references to Bram Stoker’s Dracula – in addition to Tod Browning’s 1931 adaptation. Gleeson’s character – Caleb – can be compared to Renfield or Jonathan Harker, who enters Count Dracula’s isolated castle, in this case – the ultra-modern, luxurious house of the CEO Nathan Bateman.
Including Nathan’s refusal to eat anything with Caleb and the latter’s confinement in the compound as well as his lack of contact with the rest of the world, Ex Machina owes a lot to the mysterious world constructed by Bram Stoker. Like all great filmmakers, Garland sought inspiration from a rich literary and cinematic tradition and created a commendable addition to the growing corpus of modern sci-fi.
