The Reel Review
After his wife is hospitalized with a serious illness, a father struggling to take care of his two young children buys Alice, an extremely lifelike AI android, to help around the house. But the ultra-efficient Alice soon becomes self-aware, deciding it will do whatever necessary, including kill, to embed itself into this family permanently. Megan Fox and Italian actor/model/singer Michele Morrone (365 Days) star in this sci-fi/thriller.
Director S.K. Dale’s very predictable film is a more adult-themed, R-rated rehash of M3GAN, with several nods to the much better, late 1980s and early 90s horror classics Fatal Attraction and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle. There is plenty of sex and skin in Subservience. And Fox is surprisingly convincing as the creepily beautiful AI android, Morrone less so as the stressed-out meathead of a father and husband with a weakness for the sexy robot despite its increasingly faulty CPU.
The anti-AI subplot about androids unfairly replacing construction workers, while justified, feels hemmed in to this silly story, and even though it clocks in at just over an hour and a half, the frustrating back-to-back false endings (not one, but two) has the story languishing needlessly for an additional 10 minutes. Subservience is a slightly above average but quickly forgotten sci-fi/thriller that ultimately doesn’t measure up to the excellent performance of its main star.
REEL FACTS
• Director S.K. Dale has now worked with Megan Fox on both of his feature films. Their first was 2021’s Till Death.
• Madeline Zima (Californication, The Nanny), who plays the wife in Subservience, played the daughter in 1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle.
• Subservience, like 2021’s Till Death, was filmed in Sofia, Bulgaria.
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