At first I did think the ending of the film made Ava seem cruel and Evil All Along, but then I read two reviews, one by Film Crit Hulk![](\"https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/external_link.gif\")
and another by Midnight Screenings, where they argue Ava\'s motives were more in self-interest than sadistic. The twist isn\'t merely that Ava wasn\'t nice and a helpless damsel like she (or it) was pretending to be, it\'s that she doesn\'t think like a human and is acting to keep her identity secret and not allow any dangers to escape. So Ava didn\'t imprison Caleb out of hatred, but because she calculates that she can not afford any risks of her real identity being discovered, whether by Caleb betraying her or Caleb being interrogated over what happened at the site or so on.
I think they were better ways to depict her being ruthless rather than being cruel (such as killing Caleb immediately, perhaps), but the direction is clearer to me now as \"she didn\'t hate him, she simply didn\'t give a care about him once he stopped being useful.\"
Why not outright kill him then? Because as for now, we have Bond Villain Stupidity with a serious case of Why Dont You Just Shoot Him. If the point is maximum efficiency, she would kill him. Preferably with the handle of the dumbbell, then wiping out most of the CCTV recordings. Or even the knife.
That would be her acting on efficiency, not leaving loose ends and making it look like Caleb and Nathan had to face a rebellous robot OR Nathan killing Caleb and ending in a mutual kill with his robot.
Instead, she just leaves him there, with no guarantee he won't get out. With the exact same intent - to get rid of him. If she doesn't care, then killing him makes no difference for her. If she cares, but still want to get free, then killing him would be akin to euthanasia.
Leaving him to starve to death is just needless cruelty, plus there is no guarantee he won't escape. Or, which is even more likely, finally someone realising one of the most important person in IT business is not showing up anywhere, his supplies aren't picked up (because you realise Nathan's home still need supplies, right?) and so on and forth. Ending up with sending just about ANYONE to finally show in the facility and quickly you end up with an ivestigation and/or Caleb still being somehow alive (it takes roughtly a month to starve to death)
I really like a comparison with The Disappearance Of Alice Creed, where you have a very similar set-up. An emotional guy, a ruthless guy and a locked up woman. If you didn't see it, do it. You will realise there were miriads of options for the scenario to end up in a way where Ava is at least sympathetic by the end of her story, while in the same time being ruthlessly efficient. As released, the film ends with nobody to sympathyse with, and that's one of the worst sins you can commit in script writing - making it a Shaggy Dog Story with no likable characters in it. Just think of Kaiser Soze. You LOVE that guy for pulling a lot of cruel mindgames and killing bunch of people, fully knowing you've sided with the worst person in the entire story, but you can enjoy him tricking everyone.
The trick about Ava is that she would be perfectly sympathetic if we were shown the story from her perspective. Her entire experience of humans consists of one tormenting creator who imprisoned her, and some other guy who appears in league with him and part of the experiments on her. Her not giving two hoots about either of their wellbeing is reasonable. But we are deliberately shown the story from the captors perspective, and so we are inclined to think that at least Caleb is a good person who doesn't deserve to get treated that way - he sorta actually does deserve it.
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Could be much, much better
It's hard to ignore Garland's skills as writer and director or the merits of the carefully crafted story (which is probably best watched alongside The Disappearance Of Alice Creed). But then the final act starts and the film, which up this point treated own audience as intelligent people, turns into very cheap Killer Robot plot so detatched from what the film was up to this moment, it just leaves bitter taste. Characters suddenly start making outright idiotic choices just to get the plot moving and by the end the only person the viewer can still have any sympathy for is the destroyed sex doll, which might or might not be a conscious being - a more interesting thing to ponder about than the resolution of the plot.
The story itself has very hard time deciding if it wants to be drama, a high-concept sci-fi film or a horror. One of previous Garland's works, Sunshine, had the exact same problem with plot structure. In both cases all the twists come as untwists, inserted into the story to pick up pace and make it more visceral, but instead feel like pointless elements thrown in for the sake of it. It makes them both either needlessly bloody dramas or very pretentious horror stories, never finding the right balance between the two, while wasting great potential.
Shame, the film was absolutely brilliant, but the final 15 or so minutes completely undo it, turning a very smart movie into twist-driven schlock. Comparing with Alice, Ava just comes out as cruel and outright unsympathetic by the end of her story.