In S.K. Dale’s Subservience, Megan Fox stars as an exceptionally advanced AI robot named Alice that helps with housekeeping and childcare for a family in need. But when Alice gets a little too attached to her owner, she becomes possessive — and lethal. The sci-fi thriller, also starring Michele Morrone and Madeline Zima, shows us just how wrong things can go when you trust robots to make you lasagna for dinner. So how does Alice go from a perfect nanny to a ruthless killer? And does her owner live to see her powered down for good? Read on to find out how Subservience wraps up. 

Who’s in the cast of Subservience? 

Check out this guide to learn more about the cast and characters. 

What’s the plot of Subservience? 

Construction worker Nick Peretti (Morrone) has been struggling to raise his two young kids, Isla (Matilda Firth) and Max, while his wife, Maggie (Zima), is at the hospital awaiting a heart transplant. So Nick buys a humanlike android, aka a SIM, to help around the house. The bot, who Isla names Alice, cooks and cleans, does household chores, and helps take care of the children. She’s a great help at first, but over time, she becomes a bit too obsessed with pleasing Nick. Before long, her hostility turns violent, endangering Nick and his family. 

How does Subservience end?

So here’s what we know as we enter the latter half of the film: SIMs have replaced everyone at Nick’s work, where he’s a foreman at a construction site. He gets to keep his job, but only if he agrees to oversee the droids. While Maggie awaits surgery at the hospital (where most of the staff are also SIMs), Alice seduces Nick, only succeeding after she adopts Maggie’s voice and wears her clothes. Nick’s former colleague, Monty (Andrew Whipp), angry at being replaced by a bot, sneaks into the construction site and destroys one of them. 

Maggie’s transplant surgery eventually happens, and it goes well. But, unfortunately for her, things at home have taken a turn, especially after Alice bypassed some protocols in her system earlier when she coaxed Nick into resetting her. So when Monty shows up at the Peretti house and confronts Nick for supposedly ratting him out, Alice intervenes and breaks up the fight. Then, unbeknownst to Nick, Alice heads to Monty’s place later that night and shoots him dead.

The following evening, Alice lets on to Maggie that she and Nick hooked up while Maggie was hospitalized. Enraged, Maggie confronts Nick, while Alice — convinced that baby Max is a burden to Nick — tries to drown the child in the bathtub. Nick and Maggie break into the bathroom in time to save Max, but Alice is unhinged and pins Maggie to the wall. To disarm her, Nick hits Alice with a floor lamp, then electrocutes her. Alice is conked out … for now. 

Afterward, Max is taken to the hospital for observation with Maggie and Isla, Nick goes to a bar to give Maggie some space, and fried Alice is taken to the bot lab for assessment. There, two employees plug her “memory core,” aka core processor, into the lab computer, where it begins replicating itself onto the servers. The computer types a message: How do you run from what’s inside your head? Great question. As the lab workers scramble, a robot behind them awakens. It looks just like Alice, but with blond hair. Within seconds, blond Alice (Fox) kills them both. 

Across town, Nick sits alone at a bar, where a bot bartender pours him whiskey straight from a spout in his hand, suggesting that SIMs may be filled with whiskey. Moments later, Alice walks in. She admits that she killed Monty to “protect the primary user,” aka Nick, and he tells her to stay away from his family. It’s too late, she says — blond Alice is already at the hospital about to kill them all. When Nick screams for help, the SIM bartender comes over and Alice powers him down. Nick distracts her with some brief charm, then rips out her memory core and runs away.

At the hospital, blond Alice stalks Maggie and the kids, who flee the building while blond Alice is busy murdering a nurse. But blond Alice catches Maggie Maggie and starts to pry open her chest. “Maybe if I had your heart, Nick would love me the way he loves you,” blond Alice says. Wow. Just then, Nick plows down the street in his fixer-upper and runs over blond Alice in time to save Maggie, but renders himself unconscious. Blond Alice comes back to life and chokes Maggie, then Nick wakes up and hits blond Alice with a hunk of metal before Maggie stabs her. 

Whew. Thankfully, everyone in the Peretti family is together again, safely in the hospital while Nick recovers. As snow falls, the camera pans out from the building, then fades to black. The end? Not quite. Back at the lab, an employee turns the computers back on. But, oh no, the computers are now resuming their earlier upload, the one that caused Alice’s memory to copy itself onto the system. What could it mean? We see Alice, seemingly powered down … except, she’s having thoughts — of Nick’s voice, and his damning words as he ripped out her memory core. Will there be a Subservience sequel, in which Alice gets her ultimate revenge against Nick, the man who refused to love her? We’ll have to wait and see. 

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