D/S: Caradog W. James. P: John Giwa-Amu. Cast: Toby Stephens, Caity Lotz, Denis Lawson, Sam Hazeldine, Pooneh Hajimohammadi. UK dist (Blu-ray/DVD): Anchor Bay.

Shot in Wales for under a million bucks, The Machine is a stylish and gripping science fiction thriller that’s practically a masterclass in creative filmmaking. Similar Hollywood action product typically rings in at a hundred times that budget, and is typically many hundred times less interesting. On the evidence of The Machine, writer-director Caradog James shares Mario Bava’s talent for turning pocket money into magic. James knows how to get the most from minimal sets with clever and atmospheric lighting tricks: a dark warehouse, half-a-dozen spotlights and a dab of blue gel – oh, and a healthy dollop of talent – are really all you need to keep an audience teetering on the edge of its seat. The (limited) digital FX are well up to the standard of your average blockbuster, and James handles the central premise with an expert blend of poignancy and menace.

It’s the near future. An escalating Cold War with China has plunged the West into a bottomless recession, and global conflict seems a grim probability. Vincent McCarthy (Toby Stephens) is a brilliant MOD research scientist engaged in top-secret research into artificial intelligence. His early work with brain-damaged war veterans has met with mixed success: cerebral implants have restored motor and cognitive functions almost perfectly, but for reasons he cannot explain the soldiers are struck mute within a few weeks of their operation. (There have also been one or two setbacks; early recipients of the implant had a tendency to turn violently homicidal.)

Vincent now means to take the next step – to create an android that can reason and think, using a state-of-the-art quantum computer to mimic the complexities of human consciousness. To this end he recruits top-notch AI boffin Ava (Caity The Pact Lotz), persuading her that only the MOD has sufficient resources to fund her research. Nominally, the android will be a weapon: an assassin designed to infiltrate, and eliminate, the Chinese top brass. But Vincent confides to Ava the real object of his work: to employ the quantum computer to map and repair the neural network of his own young daughter, who is suffering from a rare and catastrophic brain disease. No sooner has Ava happily consented to help, however, she is abruptly murdered by Chinese spies – apparently seeking to sabotage the AI project.

But the orders came, in fact, from Vincent’s ruthless MOD boss Thomson (Denis Lawson), who runs the facility like a prison camp. Amputee war veterans are little more than guinea pigs, kept in holding pens and watched by cyber-enhanced guards fitted with Vincent’s high-tech brain implants (and, of course, armed to the teeth). Vincent continues with the project alone, uploading into the robot a copy of Ava’s consciousness (which he had scanned into the quantum computer before her death). And the process is a success: the android, called simply “Machine” (Caity Lotz), is an uncanny simulacrum of human life.

At first, Machine behaves like a naive, trusting infant, touchingly devoted to Vincent. But after Thomson starts to visit her in the lab after hours, and the covert element of her programming kicks in, she soon acquires the talents of a super-fast killing machine. And Thomson means to go one step further – to blackmail Vincent into removing Ava’s identity from Machine’s mind, so that she is nothing more than a robot slave. What none of the humans have realised, however, is that the brain-implant soldiers are not mute: they can speak, but only to each other – in a guttural machine language only they can understand. And quietly, methodically, they have formed their own plans for survival…

This is cracking stuff: gripping and inventive, with a classy visual sheen and solid production values all round. Added techno-menace is supplied by Tom Raybould’s pulsating electronic score, a stirring retro throwback to the glory days of Carpenter, Moroder and Vangelis; it’s especially strong during Machine’s visually-striking birth sequence, as a blood-like fluid flows into the robot’s body and gradually softens its brutal lines with curves of human flesh. There’s a pleasing verisimilitude to The Machine’s technological details – from the smooth, ovoid and plausibly organic brain which Vincent inserts into Machine’s skull, to the amniotic jelly which spills from her mouth when she first tries to speak. Stephens and Lotz have a good rapport as creator and creation, with Lotz (The Pact) playing Machine as a cross between Marilyn Monroe and Robocop; her character arc from childlike naivety to implacable resolve is never less than wholly credible. She’s a thinking, living creature, capable of fear, affection, gratitude – and (just so we’re clear) bone-crunching, bullet-spraying mayhem. Denis Lawson is less effective as the rather rote villain, though he does his best with a somewhat underwritten role.

The subject of artificial life is hardly new, of course, and The Machine carries inevitable echoes not just of Mary Shelley but of the filmic iterations on her basic theme (chiefly Metropolis and 2001: A Space Odyssey). The eyes of the AI-implanted guards also reflect light like Blade Runner replicants – a nicely eerie touch, as they glide through the shadows on their own dark agenda. But The Machine is more than mere imitation. Self-replicating artificial intelligence is a frightening concept, right enough, but this film isn’t interested merely in sounding a warning from the rooftops; its message seems to be that AI is the next step on the evolutionary ladder, and that conscious machine life has every bit as much right to survive as we do. The Machine ends on an ambivalent, bittersweet note which suggests a new dawn has arrived – and that the days of H.Sapiens may be numbered. This is a thoughtful, moving and exciting film which deserves a look from genre fans bored with the usual shoot-‘em-up fare passed off as SF. Let’s hope director Caradog James manages to build on this early promise, and isn’t churning out Terminator sequels in Toronto in ten years’ time.