Tau

Year: 2018

Actors: Gary Oldman, Maika Monroe, Ed Skrein, Sharon D. Clarke

Duration: 97 min

Julia (Maika Monroe) is a young woman who steals at seedy nightclubs. She is abducted from her home and awakens in a jail cell with a glowing implant in the back of her neck. Two other subjects are with her. Julia is taken to a lab daily and subjected to a painful procedure that downloads her memories from her brain via the implant. In one such visit, Julia steals a knife from the lab and uses that to cut her restraints. After multiple sessions of psychological torture by a man named Alex (Ed Skrein), she destroys the cell (she uses the knife and shards of her pajamas to short circuit the electricity grid outside her cell) and adjacent lab in an escape attempt. They cannot escape the front door as it is programmed to the fingerprints of Alex alone. The two other subjects are killed by a robot, Aries, run by an artificial intelligence (AI) named Tau (Gary Oldman). Aries is about to kill Julia when Alex arrives and stops the robot.Julia watches as Alex orders Tau to clean up the house. Tau activates several big and small robots who clean up and repair the entire house. It is revealed that Alex is the CEO of a company named Upton and is working on creating an AI entity which has the ability to learn from human emotions. This work is light years ahead in its field and has military applications in the form of Aries.Alex reveals that the implant is collecting Julia's neural activity for an AI project. Destroying the lab has set back his research. In the face of a two-week deadline, Alex keeps Julia a prisoner in his house and insists that she complete puzzles and cognitive tests. In exchange Julia wants real food, clothes and a shower every night. While Alex is away at work each day, Julia converses with Tau about the world outside the house. It is clear that, although intelligent in some ways, Tau is ignorant of how people feel or the world at large. Alex tells Julia that while Tau is very advanced, it can yet behave erratically when given uncontrolled information. So, Alex keeps Tau disconnected from the outside world. While Tau begins to understand the harm in Julia's situation, his programming prevents him from releasing her. In exchange for information about the outside world, Tau gradually reveals more information about the house as well as Alex's experiments. Tau reveals to Julia that upstairs is Alex's bedroom. He also reveals the existence of program 6903, which is the self-destruct sequence of the house. Julia finds an escape route through an AC vent in Alex's gym, but Tau prevents her escape by asking Aries to capture her inside the vents and yank her back.Julia secretly accesses Alex's tablet computer and discovers that ten subjects have died in his experiments. Julia learns that the removal of the implant is required for the final data extraction, and that step also kills the subject. Alex later discovers her fingerprint on the tablet and assumes that Tau has slipped in his duties, so he punishes Tau by erasing its code and memories, delivering a form of pain to the AI.Julia notices that Tau's monitoring of her shuts down during his punishment, so when undetected, she hides a steak knife. When Alex returns later that night from a charity benefit, Julia begins to seduce him while he is sitting at the kitchen table, then slashes him. As the two struggles, Tau threatens Alex with pain if he does not stop hurting Julia. Alex forces Aries to hit Julia repeatedly and then tells both Tau and Julia that whatever was going on is over. While repairing Tau, he disconnects a drone from the network.The next day, Julia convinces Tau that Alex will kill her if she does not escape. Julia helps Tau understand that a person is not a killing machine and that as people grow up, they learn from their own memories and experiences. Tau bypasses his prohibition in releasing her by opening an air duct in the atrium. As she escapes, Alex arrives, sees Julia missing, and begins punishing Tau. Julia returns to save Tau, but it is too late-all of his memories of her have been erased.Alex has Julia strapped down in the basement to extract her implant, a procedure that will kill her. The disconnected drone, still containing Tau's former consciousness and memories, helps Julia break free from her restraints. She knocks Alex unconscious and cuts off his hand with a bone saw to use on the house's bio-metric sensors. Aries sees her in the atrium and chases her upstairs to Alex's bedroom. As the robot breaks through the door, she uses Alex's severed hand to activate the house's self-destruct mechanism. She narrowly escapes through a cracking wall with the drone that saved her-all that remains of Tau.

Genre: Action   Horror   Sci-Fi   Thriller