Review of Morgan (2016) by Dottheeyes — 02 Sep 2016

In Morgan, a hypnotic visual style and an enviable ensemble of character actors compensate for fairly predictable—though still engaging—storytelling. The plot turns on an icy corporate analyst (Kate Mara) who travels to a remote compound to assess the viability of an artificial-intelligence research project.

Her visit is precipitated by a violent incident involving Morgan (Anya Taylor-Joy), the team's five-year-old laboratory miracle. Morgan's caregivers-cum-captors are played by, among others, Toby Jones, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and Game of Thrones' Rose Leslie.

Nothing is particularly novel here—the peril of self-preservation among A.I., an ethical suspicion of biotechnology, a third-act emphasis on chasing and bloodshed after a setup in the vein of Agatha Christie or Clue—but first-time feature director Luke Scott (son of Ridley and a member of the second unit on his father's Exodus: Gods and Kings) commands attention with a steadily mounting sense of dread and sumptuous use of misty, verdant forest locations in Northern Ireland.

He at least copies and lifts from the best, including Ex Machina and dad's Alien, to create his late-summer genre diversion. And Taylor-Joy, so transfixing in The Witch earlier this year, delivers another enigmatic performance as the title figure; she is at once naïvely disarming and eerily otherworldly in conveying the character's just-shy-of-human nature.

The way Morgan is at once protagonist and antagonist, both brutal and sympathetic, is one of the film's chief pleasures.