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There are three speaking parts, tops, in Ex Machina, the latest from director and writer Alex Garland, and the action unfolds mostly in the various rooms of one location. And yet, with uncommon intelligence and the even more uncommon ability to look without blinking, Garland's made the one of the best sci-fi films of the past several years, a wicked and wise parable of the near-now that's honed to a gleam.

It's easy to see and appreciate touches from and nods to Stanley Kubrick's 2001 in Ex Machina from as far away as its premise and a few early pictures of its symmetrical, sterile sets and shots. The unexpected joy is that there's more than a few touches of Dr. Strangelove and Lolita in it too, as the characters deal with big issues -- humanity, sex, the end of the world -- in extremely close quarters.

Ex Machina begins with dedicated code-writer Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, pallid and lanky and blinking) winning a company-wide raffle with the big prize of a week at the CEO and founder's faraway retreat -- just you and the big boss for a whole seven days in the superbly designed middle of nowhere. Arriving, Caleb finds his boss Nathan (Oscar Isaac, buff and bearded and fraught with conviction) to welcome him, explaining that Caleb's newly-printed key card will open any door in the complex … except the ones that are locked, a nice high-tech riff on what Bluebeard told his wife.

Nathan, a confident and self-built brogramming genius, didn't actually call Caleb up to his remote chateau of wonders to relax and hang; Nathan has had Caleb come to  perform a very specific task.

Nathan has created an artificial intelligence in a humanoid body. It's called Ava, and as played by Alicia Vikander, she's not all there. Literally; some of her body is see-through, revealing the workings inside, some of it is covered with something like cloth and some of it is covered with fake flesh, making Vikander's Ava both partially transparent and utterly impenetrable. Nathan tells Caleb he's there to test if Ava is a real artificial intelligence; Ava tells Caleb very different things. Caleb doesn't know who to believe. That's by design.

There are a variety of impressive special-effects in Ex Machina, but there are also subtle things that must have taken a great amount of trickery that, cumulatively, work extraordinarily well. When Ava moves, for but one example, you can hear the echoes and workings of her mechanical body, like a fan being bent in a vent as it moves. Ava is messing with Caleb, and so is Nathan; when Ava insists she wants Caleb, his confusion isn't helped by Nathan's blunt factual statement that Ava can have sex, and Caleb can also have it with her if he wants. "Sexuality is fun, man. She has … sensors," he notes, with a sinisterly dismissive hand wave. "She'll feel it."

That's where I saw Kubrick's Lolita in Ex Machina: Not just in an inappropriate desire, but in the comedy of two men fighting over who gets to have the (literal) object of their inappropriate affections. And for all of the preening and posturing between Nathan and Caleb, there are bigger issues in play, here, too. The sense of the apocalypse -- or, more frighteningly, a sense of what could happen to humanity if Eva escaped -- is also smartly underplayed, with Caleb idly playing OMD's "Enola Gay" on the stereo and quoting A-bomb creator J. Robert Oppenheimer to Nathan. Nathan, of course, mis-quotes Oppenheimer back.

It is one thing to have a clever idea and the taste to execute it cleanly, of course, and another to have the actors who can sell the tale. Garland has chosen wisely here. Isaac is terrific; Nathan is a man who has not only started reading his own press releases, he has in fact started writing his own press releases. As Caleb, Gleason is note-perfect in a less showy but similarly tough part: Naive but not stupid, intelligent but not cunning. And as Ava, Vikander is perfectly … off, smooth and sculpted and yet as cooly appealing as the aluminum planes and curves of a MacBook. You could reduce Ex Machina to an updated Freud joke -- What do robot women want? -- but Ava's both immensely powerful and newly-born; perhaps the best test of her humanity comes in that she can deliberately hurt another being's feelings, and do so with purpose.

It is also necessary to note, in between the manipulations and machinations and evolutionary leaps in consciousness contained inside Ex Machina, it is also a movie that is very funny, not just smart  but clever. There's a dance sequence -- and I'm not mis-typing -- that's funny and freaky, silly and scary. Isaac's version of Nathan's hearty self-made-jerk schtick is both true and funny, while Gleeson's pale face is often used to deadpan effect, making him a crumpled straight man.

Garland's other writing credits include the criminally under-seen Never Let Me Go and the surprisingly influential 28 Days Later; he has a rare sensibility for sci-fi, one which can find ideas worth exploring and create moments worthy of contemplation in both the ways the fictional scenario's world is different from the world we know but also in the ways the fictional scenario's world is similar to the world we know. It's the same here; no matter how much Nathan tells Caleb to forget Nathan's his boss, Caleb can't. And when Caleb realizes just how well Nathan really knows him, it's a moment that's shocking, funny and sad.

Ex Machina is very different from the mindless, expensive bulk of most American science-fiction films, and that's to its credit in the end; it's a film that thinks you're smart enough to figure out the ramifications of its plot and appreciate the motives of its characters, which makes for a pleasant change from the usual mix of flat exposition and phony explosions we're told to consider science fiction. Smart and strange and spooky, Ex Machina is a thrilling treat with both a cool intelligence and a beating, vulnerable heart.