There are plenty of great sci-fi movies from the 2010s, but not many of them get under your skin the way Ex Machina does. Alex Garland’s directorial debut arrived with a smaller scale than most studio genre movies, but that’s part of why it hit so hard. It doesn’t need giant world-building dumps or endless action to make its point. Instead, it traps you in a sleek, uncomfortable space with three people, one machine, and a whole lot of questions about power, control, and consciousness. More than a decade later, it still feels sharp, eerie, and weirdly ahead of its time.
That’s what makes the timing a little brutal for HBO Max subscribers. Ex Machina is reportedly set to leave the platform on May 1, which means there isn’t much time left to catch one of the smartest sci-fi movies of its decade before it disappears. While HBO Max’s own public monthly exit list is not easy to pin down directly, recent streaming coverage has included Ex Machina among the major movies leaving the service in April 2026, pointing to a May 1 exit.
Released in 2014 and written and directed by Garland, Ex Machina follows Caleb, a young programmer who’s invited to the isolated estate of his company’s brilliant and deeply unsettling CEO, Nathan. Once there, he’s asked to administer a kind of Turing test on Ava, a humanoid AI whose intelligence quickly proves far more complicated than expected. What starts as a cerebral tech thriller slowly turns into something colder, sadder, and much more dangerous.
How Good Is ‘Ex Machina’?
The cast is a huge part of why the movie works as well as it does. Domhnall Gleeson plays Caleb, Oscar Isaac is Nathan, and Alicia Vikander delivers one of the best performances of the decade as Ava. Collider’s Perri Nemiroff reviewed the movie at SXSW in 2015, and she was a huge fan of what she saw from Garland’s debut outing:
“Clearly Garland set out to deliver a deeply character-driven A.I. film and picking apart her programming could have steered it in a different direction, but the idea is so surprisingly grounded that that’s what I was most interested in. Ex Machina is a strong feature and a huge achievement in a number of ways. There’s a surprising amount of very effective humor courtesy of Isaac’s character, there’s an extremely riveting scenario at the core of the film, and there’s also tons of stunning visual work to admire as well. But, for an exceptionally unique and layered character study, Ex Machina has a surprisingly minimal amount of humanity and that keeps the film from striking a chord on a deeper level and having a lasting effect.”
Ex Machina leaves HBO Max at the end of April.
- Release Date
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April 24, 2015
- Runtime
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108 minutes
- Director
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Alex Garland
