Ex Machina was probably the most interesting science-fiction film of 2015. It even won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, not bad in a year in which it had to contend with Mad Max: Fury Road and Star Wars: The Force Awakens. It was even the debut feature of its director Alex Garland and stars Oscar Isaac, who as I’ve said before, seems to be in everything these days.

Isaac plays Nathan Bateman, the genius founder of the world’s largest search engine. Out of the blue, he invites one of his company’s top programmers, Caleb Smith, to his secluded retreat to work on a top secret project. Bateman has, it seems, not only invented true artificial intelligence, he has built a fantastically realistic robotic chassis in which to seat his creation. As in so many other science-fiction works, it just so happens that this robot takes the form of a beautiful young woman named Ava. Smith’s job, as Bateman explains, is to perform a sort of reverse Turing Test. Can Smith relate to Ava as he would to a real person, even though he knows fully well that she is a robot? But between Bateman’s increasingly creepy behavior and Ava’s admonitions to Smith that her creator is not to be trusted, there is clearly more going on beneath the surface.

To be honest, the film made a very poor first impression on me and I was prepared to dislike it. Garland’s directing is full of flaws, such as wasting too much time on a dramatic but narratively and emotionally meaningless build-up when Smith arrives at the retreat. That the house seems more suited to a James Bond villain than a credible genius inventor and that we’re supposed to believe that one man, and one man alone, could build both an artificial intelligence and the robot body it is housed in, made it hard for me to take it seriously. It didn’t help that every time Bateman opens his mouth to explain the supposed technical details, like the wetware that the robot’s brain uses or how the data collected by a search engine reveals how people think, I feel like slapping my forehead.

As I continued to watch however it dawned on me that the writing is more intelligent that I initially gave it credit for. There’s a good reason why Bateman is so evasive about answering Smith’s questions about how his technology works, beyond the fact that his answers are terrible. There’s a reason why Ava is a walking sexbot. There’s a reason why Bateman ignores the frequent blackouts. I loved that the film is genre aware and takes pains to head off a possible direction that everyone could see coming in the most shocking way possible. As someone who has read about the Mary’s Room thought experiment many, many times, having it laid out in the film didn’t do much for me but the eventual payoff when Ava walks out of the house was still immensely satisfying.

Both Domhnall Gleeson as Smith and Alicia Vikander as Ava are pretty great with their conversations being easily the best bits of the film. I’m ticked as well that Gleeson was also the actor who appeared in that episode of Black Mirror about an AI generated from social media posts and subsequently housed in a robot body. That surely couldn’t have been a coincidence. Strangely enough Isaac may well be the weak link here. He pulls off the weirdo creep half of the role well enough but I just can’t see as being the genius inventor who made all of this cool technology.

In the end, Ex Machina still can’t compare to the sophistication of a truly brilliant film about AI like Her, and I suspect that Garland may be a better screenwriter than a director. But it’s a fine science-fiction film that does deserve to be watched and taken seriously.