The central question Ex Machina, the excellent 2014 sci-fi thriller, is whether Ava — the humanoid robot created by billionaire genius Nathan Bateman and imprisoned within his home  — has consciousness. And because this is a movie and not a scientific dissertation (to quote Nathan, “I want to have a beer and a conversation with you. Not a seminar”), consciousness is largely treated as a short-hand for humanity. Is Ava like us? She’s not biologically human, of course, but is she sapient — can she think, reason, feel? Is she self-aware? Can she feel attraction, empathy —  love?

At the end of the movie, it might seem like we have our answer. Caleb Smith, a young programmer who “won” an office contest to stay at Nathan’s luxurious, isolated home, has been tasked with testing Ava’s consciousness, or lack thereof. Over a series of one-on-one conversations, he becomes convinced that she is conscious; that she’s practically human; that she loves him. So, when Nathan reveals that he plans to wipe Ava’s mind, Caleb hatches a plan to help her escape – they’ll leave together. They’ll be together. But once Ava is freed, she instead leaves Caleb trapped alone in Nathan’s isolated fortress, with no hope of ever getting out.

So, it seems Ava is not like us. Oh, perhaps she is intelligent – Nathan even says the real test was not whether she convinced Caleb of her consciousness but whether she could effectively manipulate Caleb into helping her escape – but she’s certainly not capable of anything else that distinguishes humanity. She’s not capable of morality. She’s not capable of empathy. She’s just a highly sophisticated machine that won’t stray from its goal even for the few moments it would take to save Caleb from inevitable death by starvation. She’s far from human.

This is a common interpretation of Ex Machina and not necessarily the wrong one – I think it’s a film that’s left purposefully ambiguous. But I think it’s worth examining where this interpretation comes from, why Ava’s treatment of Caleb lands so definitively. Part of it is, I think, that Caleb is our audience surrogate. We’ve watched the whole movie from his eyes, so when Ava leaves him, we feel the betrayal personally: How could you do that to him? How could you do that us? It’s easy to make the same mistake Caleb made earlier in the film when he thinks the question of whether Ava genuinely likes him only depends on whether she has the capacity to like someone. Nathan points out the obvious third option: “Whether she’s pretending to like you.” Similarly, I don’t think Ava’s treatment of Caleb definitively answers the question of whether or not she has the capacity for empathy. There’s a third option: she has the capacity for empathy; she just doesn’t empathize with Caleb — or at least not enough to save him.

Because there are plenty of reasons why Ava — why anyone in her position — would choose not to save Caleb. Ava’s survival is her first priority, and he’s the only person in the world who knows that she’s a robot: If she lets him out, he might tell someone. She could be trapped again. She could be killed. Leaving Caleb ties off that lose end and gives her a better chance at real freedom. Or maybe Ava wouldn’t have saved Caleb even if the stakes were lower, even if it would cost her nothing to let him out; perhaps she views him as someone not worth her time or her empathy. Perhaps she views him as complicit.

It’s impossible to continue with this argument without pointing out that Caleb and Nathan are men, and Ava is consistently coded as a woman. The movie encourages a gendered analysis: all of Nathan’s robots look like beautiful women; he enlists at least one of them into domestic, and possibly sexual, servitude; he leaves the naked carcasses of outdated robot models hanging in cabinets. In one of the movie’s most disturbing images, we see a recording of a robot beating her arms against the walls of her prison until they disintegrate. Nathan’s power over the beings he creates is oppressive, patriarchal — and Caleb, whether willingly or not, is complicit in that power. He agrees to question Ava, to judge her. He’s free to move around the house the entire time she’s trapped in her room. He only becomes invested in her freedom once she convinces him she’s romantically interested in him — he only cares when he stands to gain. So why does she owe him empathy? Why is empathy for him, this one decent but still complicit man, the threshold for her humanity?

I think this focus on Ava’s treatment of Caleb speaks to the way we often view oppressed groups. We judge them based on their ability empathize with the majority, especially those in the majority who, like Caleb, mean well. Women are always told they need to understand where men are coming from. Black people just need to understand the white perspective. But why? Why should that be the standard? Why do you have to have empathy for those who, while you were trapped and suffering, walked free?

I’ve seen the ending of Ex Machina interpreted as a cautionary tale for a future when machines are intelligent enough to mimic human empathy for their own nefarious ends. But I think the movie is not just about the future but also the past, the present: it’s about what happens when we push people or peoples so far that empathy becomes beside the point. Nathan created Ava, and even though she may well have been capable of empathy and morality and love, we have no way of knowing for sure because Nathan’s treatment of her forced her to prioritize the things every living being prioritizes when its life and sanity is at stake: Survival. Escape. And so, the question of Ava’s humanity can’t be answered within the movie itself. It can only be answered after that last scene: Ava walking in her new skin into a new world, finally free to become all she is capable of being.

Believability is always a tricky thing in cult movies. From the outside, cults rarely seem like a great idea and the one in Martha Marcy May Marlene (2011), a naturalistic thriller starring Elizabeth Olsen as a woman who is indoctrinated into and then escapes from a cult, has some especially glaring drawbacks. Ritualized rape. Burglary. Cat murder. Person murder. How likely is it that Olsen’s Martha (rechristened Marcy May by the cult) would go along with all of this, especially since in the earliest pre-cult scenes she seems to be relatively well-adjusted and emotionally stable?

The leader of the cult, Patrick (played by John Hawkes), is the nominal draw. But while Hawkes is charismatic and compelling as he usually is, his dialogue as Patrick ranges from hokey cult-speak (“Death is beautiful because everyone fears death”) to pretty rote pop psychology (“I know people have abandoned you your whole life. Your father.”) Even though the movie does a good job establishing pre-cult Martha as someone without a strong support system, Patrick still doesn’t seem like a persuasive enough figure to draw her into all the cult-y hijinks.

But the movie does something very smart, very persuasive, and, to me, deeply upsetting: it focuses on the women in the cult. There’s Zoe, Martha’s young, bubbly handler, and Katie, a warm, maternal figure who assures Martha early on that “it takes time for people to find their role in a new family.” They are the ones who initially provide Martha with the connections she longs for, and they are the ones who, at first gently and later more harshly, enforce the norms of the cult. Every time Martha watches one of Patrick’s creepy interactions with a member of his harem, Zoe or Katie chides her not to stare: Patrick’s relationships with the other women are none of her business. When Martha samples a bite of dinner as she cooks, Katie slaps her: The women don’t eat until the men finish.

And most disturbingly of all, Zoe and Katie normalize Martha’s rape. It’s an initiation ritual: Martha is drugged, clothed in white, and brought to a darkened room where Patrick is waiting. Afterwards, Martha and Zoe lay in bed together, and Zoe tells her “I’d give anything to have my first time again” with the enthusiasm of high schooler describing a first kiss with her crush. Katie’s response is even more insidious. She comes to Martha outside the room where it happened, where Martha is disoriented, still drugged, not fully understanding what has happened. Katie sits next to her and says, her voice full of kindness and understanding:

I know you feel like something bad just happened, Marcy May. But you have to trust me, that wasn’t bad. That was truly good. We’ve all been in this situation. We wouldn’t all still be here if what happened in that room was bad.

In oppressive patriarchal societies, women don’t make the rules. They don’t commit the atrocities. They are the custodians of the domestic sphere, the arbiters of the day to day, and so, their power is the power to weave the atrocities into the fabric of daily life – and to curb the behavior of anyone who would pick at the threads. Think the Aunts in The Handmaid’s Tale. Think Betty Francis (née Draper). This power, and the way it entices women into perpetuating their own subjugation, is something Martha Marcy May Marlene understands and portrays very effectively. Once Martha accepts the reality of the cult, she is assigned to be the handler for a new, painfully young recruit. Martha gets to act as the enlightened, authoritative guide: she explains where the cult members sleep, when they eat, how they contribute. She echoes Katie’s earlier encouragement: “It takes time to find your role in a new family, huh?”

We understand why Martha is doing this: indoctrinating the girl into the cult cements Martha’s own sense of belonging. And more than that: it allows her, for a time, to understand her trauma as something else. Not as something done specifically to her, but as a ritual, to be repeated. And so it is terrifying but understandable that, when the time comes, Martha commits an act she will later remember with horror. She feeds the girl a drugged smoothie, assures her there is nothing to worry about, and then leads her to the room Martha herself had entered months before: the room where nothing bad happens.

End of the Century (2019) is an inventive, gentle, Spanish queer love story that I would likely not have particularly strong feelings about – if not for one minor character, who is so wonderfully vibrant and alive that she throws the whole movie out of whack. But first, let’s establish the basics:

Our main characters, thirty-something Ocho and Javi, meet in Barcelona, and at first it looks like the movie is going to be a Before Sunrise-esqe ramble through their weekend romance (Javi is married and has a child; Ocho is only in town for a short time). But then, midway through, we leap back twenty years to the men’s actual first meeting, where they have a brief, boozy connection, full of sexual and romantic promise. Then we’re back to the present, where the movie has one more temporal twist: After the men part ways for a second time, Ocho imagines what it would have been like if they had gotten together after that first meeting; if they were living an alternative present in which they were now a long-term couple with a child. It’s an imaginative way to portray that urge we all have sometimes – to break out of the relentless linearity of time, double back, do it all differently – and one that is especially resonant for queer people, who often waste years hiding who they are, waiting for the chance to be themselves. 

Too bad, then, that the first two sections don’t give this imagined stretch the emotional oomph it needs to be truly tragic or moving. The characters, despite having detailed discussions about Big Life Things (hopes, dreams, past relationships, number of kids wanted) never quite emerge as fully developed people. Ocho is somewhat broody and at some point has a change of heart about having kids. Javi is more playful and once tried to make a documentary. Beyond that, I never got a real sense of who these characters were, outside of their chance encounters with each other; what drove them through life, what drove them together. But still, this might have been a perfectly lovely, if somewhat emotionally malnourished, movie of lost romance – if not for Sonia. 

Sonia is a minor character, though also the only character with any real screen time besides the two leads. We meet her in the twenty-years-ago section, where she is dating Javi and hosting Ocho for his first Barcelona vacation. In her first and only real dialogue-substantive scene, she tells Ocho about a past breakup: how she woke up in her hotel room surrounded by the things her ex-boyfriend left behind, and then jumped into the fetid hotel pool, reasoning that if she survived the jump, she could survive the break up – only to get a UTI days later from said fetid pool. It’s just one scene, but it does for Sonia’s character what many, many conversations between Ocho and Javi never could for theirs: it makes her a real person. A specific person, romantic, impulsive, self-aware. The sort of person who lives her life in a series of dramatic set pieces and then tells her friends with charming self-deprecation afterwards.

Of course, I knew, even then, how her story was supposed to function. She was there as a thematic echo, her breakup presaging the heart-ache that, for Ocho and Javi, was still to come. A subsequent scene of her singing opera is not even nominally about her – it just there to add some musical texture to Ocho’s story. I knew all of this but I didn’t care. Already her story was bigger, truer, and more vivid than Ocho’s or Javi’s. (Credit must also be given to the actress, Mia Maestro, who manages to convey all of this nuance in what is, again, mere moments of screen time). 

Imagine my devastation then, when, after arriving back in the present, Javi reveals that Sonia has died in the intervening years. Not just died: hit by a garbage truck while walking to a singing engagement. A garbage truck! Now, let this not stand as a general condemnation of off-screen deaths, silly or otherwise: when a character has been properly developed, killing them unceremoniously can be an effective, realistic gut punch (see: Moonlight; Pandemic) – but not here. Here, Sonia, despite that one great scene, was never given her own story, so her death only functions in the context of the men’s lives. It’s just a metaphor – for the brutal passage of time, for the people you lose along the way, for the lost love of the central pair. It’s a device and a cheap one. (It is perhaps also illustrative of how queer men and women in media seem to always jostle for narrative room, pushing each other out of the limelight, using each other for their own narrative ends – a point reinforced by the off-hand revelation that Sonia provided the egg that produced Javi’s daughter).    

But then, as I was still chafing from Sonia’s death and how lightly our leads move past it, the film comes to that final, imagined stretch. Ocho wanders the streets of Barcelona with he and Javi’s (imagined) child strapped to his chest. He turns a corner and there she is: Sonia, alive, singing opera alone in a beautiful courtyard, a hat full of coins in front of her. Ocho and his daughter stop to listen. He tosses a coin into her hat. It is a beautiful scene, that initially seems to function within a sort of dream-logic (why else would Sonia, established as a well-respected opera singer, be singing on the street?) until a conversation between Ocho and Javi reveals that she has been forbidden from practicing in her apartment and now enjoys “playing homeless.” It’s a perfect detail – so in keeping with what we know about Sonia’s character, her flair for both the dramatic and the irreverent. 

But watching this scene and thinking about it afterward, I wanted to resist the beauty of it. I wanted to be angry that Sonia, who was killed for cheap emotional resonance, was now being brought back for even more cheap emotional resonance. I wanted to be angry that the movie felt like the flimsy central romance should be equated with a woman’s entire existence – especially when the movie had previously treated that existence as something of a punchline.. And most of all, I wanted to be angry the Sonia we got in this section, even with her perfect lovely details, was not really Sonia but just Ocho’s projection of her: as a minor, but charitably resurrected, figure in the grand story of his and Javi’s romance. 

But I couldn’t stay mad. The scene is too beautiful for me to be mad at; it hits too hard. If this essay is anything, let it be a testament to the unwieldiness and subjectivity of art – the way viewers can take home meanings that artists never intended, the way certain characters can break out of their scripted roles, become inconveniently alive. Years from now, when I have forgotten everything about Ocho and Javi, forgotten even the title of this movie, I will remember Sonia. I will remember her, miraculously resurrected, singing in the courtyard. I will remember how, if I could talk to her, she might have told me the story of her death. How she was late for her singing engagement, how she bustled out of the house, bedecked in a gown, in a nice fur coat, hurried and self-important, only to be hit by a garbage truck. “A garbage truck!” she’d emphasize, alive to the ridiculousness of it: “That’s how it ended for me, a garbage truck.” Then she laughs, gestures to the beautiful streets of Barcelona, this imagined world that no longer belongs to Ocho, whom I have forgotten, but to her: “But then – this! I woke up to this!” She turns back to me, conspiratorial, as if this isn’t something she tells everyone who asks: “Almost makes the garbage truck worth it, doesn’t it?”