RAGE AGAINST THE “FUCK MACHINE”: Meginfrid’s newest offering sucks and fucks its way into our hearts

Korean-Finnish director Seok Meginfrid, slowly but surely establishing a reputation in experimental film, isn’t alone when he calls FUCK MACHINE “the greatest, scariest and horniest movie about computers ever made”. The man stars in every film he makes; and that takes guts. This time he plays Steinar Yechezkel, an ex-cop turned mega-machine babysitter. More security guard than scientist, Yechezkel maintains the machine as it in turn maintains the lives of hundreds of people living inside it. Think Mega-City One meets pregnant cat; cramped, bloated, but perfectly designed for life, at least according to the government agency running the place. Yechezkel’s job is dull, until the machine begins expressing an interest, then a desire, in sex. With him. When he tries and fails to give the machine what it wants, the people living inside the structure pay the price.

The machine is voiced by OnlyFans megastar Aubrey River, which makes for a confusing first watch as the audience desperately tries to pin the familiar voice somehow already giving them a boner. The choice is deliberate on Meginfrid’s part; we want to fuck the machine before it asks Yechezkel to. River does a surprisingly excellent job; maybe not so surprising when you learn her most requested video category is AI/robot JOIs. River’s monotone, dispassionate voice, separated from her infamous face, is enough to unnerve and arouse. Especially when resolutely, repeatedly asking to be penetrated, then threatening to crush the people inside her if Yechezkel doesn’t make her cum.

It’s not as if Yechezkel doesn’t eagerly agree; he tries in earnest to fuck the machine, pressing nakedly against its glowing panels, slipping his way over knobs and dials, moaning into the cold darkness of the night shift. But he can’t make her human; and this thread continues throughout the film. Yechezkel can’t not be a cop, despite being off the force for a number of years. His attempts to connect with his teenage daughter are uncomfortable and strained, his relationship with his ex-wife precarious at best. He’s given all he has to being a cop and now it’s consumed him, irreversible as a cyborg transformation. There are parts of Yechezkel that simply cannot be brought back. The parts that remain, he inserts into a mess of wires and steel.

The film is beautiful, even more so as we descend into the blood-stained static it eventually becomes. The machine crushes a household every time she doesn’t get what she wants, and we bear witness to the carnage just as Yechezkel does - separated doubly through two screens. Familiar, run down homes are reduced to something resembling a crushed car, if there were a family of four inside. The deaths of these families don’t particularly move Yechezkel. They seem to represent his lack, his less-than. He can’t make a relationship work. He can’t save an immigrant family (does he even want to?). He can’t make a machine cum. The banality, the predictability of his evil is nauseating. The film is bleak and unfeeling, with horrid streaks of humanity like marks inside a toilet. It speaks to our inherent desire for connection, and capitalism’s inherent denial of it. Its twisting of it, into something unrecognizable and cold. The loneliness of inadequacy. I came out of it needing a shower and a wank.