Archive’s androids give new life to an old question: is ‘romance’ electric?

• Dir: Gavin Rothery. Cast: Theo James, Stacy Martin, Rhona Mitra, Peter Ferdinando, Toby Jones, Chris Schubert, Timea Maday Kinga. 15 cert, 109 mins

It’s not that working from home has become a way of life for George Almore, the lonely if hunky roboticist at the centre of Archive. It’s that life, home and work are one and the same. George, played by Divergent’s Theo James, resides in a remote clifftop bunker somewhere in Japan’s snow-blown north, where he’s been labouring for years on a highly secretive project.

The results to date are his cohabitants: a large android called J1, who looks and sounds like a photocopier with legs; and its smaller, nimbler, more obviously humanoid sibling, J2, who can walk, talk and think for itself, and helps with maintenance work around the compound. A third model, J3 – a head and torso of distinctly feminine appearance, trussed to an electrical rig in his workshop – remains, at least when we first meet her, an unconscious work-in-progress.

An obvious evolutionary through-line links all of George’s creations, and it’s not long before we realise what – or, rather, who – it might be pointing towards. That would be the flesh-and-blood woman called Jules (Stacy Martin) who appears to be his wife, and with whom he occasionally talks via a fuzzy video-link. But it’s unclear exactly where she’s calling from, or why contact in this high-tech age has to be made via an enormous black fridge-like appliance that takes pride of place in the bunker’s living room.

The answers are strategically drip-fed throughout the first half of this seriously stylish and intriguing debut feature from Gavin Rothery – a former comic-book artist and video-game designer whose first dip into cinema was as the visual effects supervisor on Duncan Jones’s Moon. But even once we know roughly what’s afoot, the film hasn’t come close to revealing its hand.

What is immediately and abundantly clear, though, is that we are in the realm of premium existential pulp, with all the big, searching questions, humming servo noises and sleek interiors the genre usually entails. The influence of Jones’s Moon is obvious, and Alex Garland’s Ex Machina even more so, while certain shots and sequences play as outright fanboy homages to Mamoru Oshii’s 1995 animated masterpiece Ghost in the Shell. Nothing wrong with that, of course – and the ideas that drive Archive are distinct enough from those of its forerunners for it to engross on its own terms.

For instance, there’s something deeply unsettling – and also intensely sad – about the way George treats J1 and J2 like unwanted children who have been superseded by the new and improved model in the lab. James plays his character’s obsessiveness and self-absorption with a light touch that makes it all the harder to watch, while Martin is terrific in the dual role of Jules and J3, playing the latter as a kind of uncanny-valley fantasy figure – she’s a cyborg who dances to French pop on vinyl, half gamine, half melamine, and she moves through the film as if she’s stuck in a dream that may or may not be her own.

Some noirish manoeuvrings about stolen technology ensue, with unexplained security breaches and Toby Jones making a too-brief appearance as a mysterious visitor to the compound. But it’s all in service of a Black Mirror-esque denouement that’s fairly outrageous, but which the film just manages to brazen out. All in all, Archive is good, bleak, shivery fun, and however familiar some of its components may seem, it thrums with an intelligence that’s anything but artificial.

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