Uncanny is a 2015 American science fiction film directed by Matthew Leutwyler and based on a screenplay by Shahin Chandrasoma.
It is about the world’s first “perfect” artificial intelligence (David Clayton Rogers) that begins to exhibit startling and unnerving emergent behaviour when a reporter (Lucy Griffiths) begins a relationship with the scientist (Mark Webber) who created it.
Ain’t It Cool News called it “a rare breed of thoughtful, independent science fiction.” Sight & Sound Magazine wrote, “Confident, meticulously crafted…. written with sharp brilliance and performed with perfect nuance.” Justin Lowe of The Hollywood Reporter wrote that the script “remains too simplistic to become fully involving”.
The film won the Best Film Award at the Boston Sci-Fi Festival. – wikipedia
The plot of this movie is that For ten years, inventor David Kressen has lived in seclusion with his inventions, including Adam, a robot with incredible lifelike human qualities. When reporter Joy Andrews is given access to their unconventional facility, she is alternately repelled and attracted to the scientist and his creation. But as Adam exhibits emergent behavior of anger and jealousy towards her, she finds herself increasingly entangled in a web of deception where no one’s motives are easily decipherable.
Probably this is the breakthrough the director was looking for. A limited cast low budget science fiction drama. All the faces were fresh, I liked them, but should have been a little better. I won’t deny that I enjoyed watching it, but I can’t say it is a very clever screenplay. Because it was slightly comparable to ‘Ex Machina’, though the story derives when we had a conception like ‘what if’. Just like ‘Big Stan’ and ‘Get Hard’, though this film was planned before ‘Ex Machina’ and sadly released after it.
The story of a journalist who interviews a scientist who developed an advanced AI. A week long interaction and when the final day arrives something terrible happens, that’s going to flip the story you had seen so far. The whole film was shot inside a large house, there is no outside world, except in one scene which takes us to the terrace. I did not figure it out the secret, but I kind thought of it, so when it happened at the end I was not surprised.
“For a B movie, it is a great quality. If you want to check it out a second string films, this is not a bad one to consider. There is no major, any impactable graphics to the narration, but in most of the crucial section was managed well. So the production quality is much better than I expected and so the overall film. Nowadays it is a very common for filmmakers to choose the robot theme in drama, but how good their film would be is our question and this one passed the test.”
Reno Rangan
“The film has a lot of fun with its Biblical references, some more subtle than others, and in having a male AI has a different angle to Ex Machina in terms of gender. Here, the creator doesn’t build robots with a view to sexual attraction, but the robot itself becomes sexually attracted to Joy. The resulting behaviour initially feels like that of an infatuated and confused teenager, but gets more disturbing as the film progresses. It’s not a film that feels like it’s trying for any sort of message about gender politics, unlike Ex Machina. Despite this, although Uncanny features a laughably gratuitous cleavage shot, it generally manages to portray exploitation in a less exploitative way than Ex Machina does, while still being harrowing.
“Uncanny is satisfying, first and foremost, as an immediately enjoyable thriller. Its sly sense of humour and well constructed story hold the attention, but it also manages to use imagery and subtext consistently well. The script, by Shahin Chandrasoma, is clever in an unshowy way, and similarly Matthew Leutwyler’s direction doesn’t scream ‘Look at me’, but tells the story with quietly efficiency. Considering the number of little techy doodads (sorry if I’m blinding you all with science here) on screen, the art department deserve props too (pun intended, not sorry).
Certainly with a film like Uncanny, you’d be forgiven for leaving the cinema not focussing on how solid a production it is for presumably quite a low budget. It’s got a gripping story deftly told. It’s been put together with a lot of attention to detail, enough to reward multiple viewings. You could debate the ramifications of its conclusion on a metaphorical level, or simply admire the way it subverts expectations. Or you could have an argument about whether it’s better than Ex Machina, though this would be unfair.”
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/uncanny/35893/uncanny-review
“Uncanny does a great deal on an extremely low budget, and I daresay I found it to be more entertaining than Ex Machina. The special effects aren’t too flashy, but they’re believable, and that’s what’s important in movies like this one that lean on technology. It didn’t bore me in the least, which surprised the hell out of me, but I did have two big problems with it. The script ends with a double whammy, one being the big twist right at the end, which I saw coming a mile away. The other is a quick coda that appears a few seconds into the end credits that feels really cheap, and quite frankly unbelievably silly and stupid. Sadly, Both of them take away from what was a pretty good film up to that point.”
http://gruesomemagazine.com/2015/11/03/film-review-uncanny
“UNCANNY provides for an enjoyable evening, with solid acting, good visuals, and an interesting premise. It’s not as clever as it thinks, but it raises enough questions to be of interest and is not without intelligence. If the film were more honest with itself and the audience (and treated its characters more fairly), UNCANNY would have been rather impressive. Ultimately, one can’t help but feel that it would have made an excellent short. As a feature, it has value but does not merit more than one viewing.”
http://www.notlp.com/blog/index.php/2015/10/22/film-review-uncanny/
