Film Review: Subservience

Subservience
Director: S.K. Dale
Millennium Media and Grobman Films
Streaming: 09.13

When that rare horror movie comes along that manages to be smart, scary, and topical, it injects a fresh life and sense of excitement into the genre that is electrifying. Subservience is decidedly not that movie, though it desperately wants to be, and the closest it comes to electrifying is an almost shocking lack of originality.

The so-called draw here is Megan Fox (Transformers, Jennifer’s Body) playing a sexy yet vapid and lifeless automaton—intentionally this time—who serves as a robotic nanny for a family going through a rough time. When younger mother Maggie (Madeline Zima, Bombshell, Bliss), suffers a near-fatal heart attack, she is forced to enter the hospital until a heart donor can be found, and husband Nick (Michele Morrone, Bar Giuseppe, 365 Days) goes to Kobol, a leading AI company, where he buys Alice to care for the kids: precocious daughter Isle (Matilda Firth, Disenchanted) and baby Max (Jude Allen Greenstein). Alice tends to their every need while Mommy is away. Alice becomes a valued member of the household, with the kids taking a shine to her. One night, after Nick has had a particularly stressful day at work, she puts a blindfold on him, mimics Maggie’s voice, and takes care of a few of Nick’s more pressing needs as well. Maggie gets her new heart, clicks her heels together and goes home (unfortunately, the hospital is unable to provide Nick with courage or a brain), and tries to resume her life. The only problem is that Alice has gotten rather attached to her role as the replacement Maggie, and to Nick, believing that she is just the upgrade that the family needs, and decides to do whatever it takes to make sure that Maggie doesn’t get in her way.

Subservience can be somewhat forgiven for blatantly borrowing themes and ideas from science fiction novels and short stories of Isaac Asimov, simply because nearly anything with robots in it is going to do so on some level, and even real life fears of losing jobs and more to AI is starkly echoing Asimov’s visionary work. Unfortunately, the science fiction element is kept far too muted, due in part to budget restrictions, though it also seems to be a lack of creativity, and this movie takes place in a world where AI has progressed far enough to have perfect human replicas, yet cell phones of all things haven’t advanced in any noticeable way. Subservience also lifts from more than just Asimov, and a more appropriate title might have been The Terminator that Rocks the Cradle, as it feels like a cheap mashup of the pulpy yet entertaining movies that made James Cameron and Curtis Hanson‘s breakthrough films as A-list directors. The similarity to The Hand That Rocks The Cradle is so obvious that writer-director S.K. Dale seems to be making a playful nod to it with the casting of Zima, who played the young daughter in the 1992 cult favorite, though they miss the opportunity to reference her role on the Fran Drescher sitcom The Nanny. Unfortunately, this is the only tangible sign we get that Dale has a sense of humor, and while Subservience is almost able to coast by at times on a certain schlocky appeal, it plays out with such a gloomy seriousness that it’s difficult to find much entertainment value in the film. There’s also a deadly slow pacing and frustrating lack of suspense, in part because it’s all so woefully predictable.

Fox is certainly well cast in the role, though she never managed to be interesting, and Mirrone is even more lifeless and robotic than Fox, making Nick very difficult to root for even when he’s not getting it on with the appliances. Zima is the only one of the principals who manages to inject any life into the proceedings. While Dale’s interest in using everyone as tawdry eye candy extends to Zima as well, she manages to rise above it in a way that Fox and Mirrone fail to do.

Subservience is utterly devoid of anything of substance to say on a topic that is so substantive at the moment, it’s such a campy yet timely concept that there was certainly a fun guilty pleasure hidden in here somewhere. The problem is that it’s simply not fun. The finished product really only works on the level that it mirrors the problem with artificial intelligence: no matter how close it can come to filling the requirements asked of it, the soulless emptiness of it all makes it impossible to truly embrace. –Patrick Gibbs

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