Ex Machina Meets It Follows in the Trailer for Netflix’s Tau

Hypothetical question: If you’ve got a movie to promote that stars Gary Oldman as a murderous artificial intelligence, doesn’t that seem like something you’d highlight in the film’s first trailer? It does, doesn’t it? It’s not just us, right?
Questions aside, that’s what we found ourselves wondering while watching the just-released first trailer for Netflix’s Tau, which hits the streaming service on June 29. Nowhere in the footage does the film credit Gary Oldman, a guy who just won Best Actor at the Oscars a few months ago, as one of the main characters, which certainly seems like an odd choice to us, but what do we know?
Tau is a cyber-thriller of sorts, starring Maika Monroe of It Follows fame as a young woman kidnapped by a man (Ed Skrein) and held prisoner in some sort of futuristic smart home. According to the implications of the film’s synopsis, her only way out is to forge some kind of bond with the artificial intelligence that controls the home, voiced by Oldman. The parallels to something like Alex Garland’s Ex Machina are obvious, although we also can’t help but be reminded of the robot companion played by Kevin Spacey in Duncan Jones’ Moon. The film is the directorial debut of Federico D’Alessandro, best known as an animatronics supervisor and storyboard artist on a number of MCU and DCU films, including Doctor Strange, The Mummy and Ant-Man. Here’s the film’s full synopsis: