Who’s testing who?

All it takes is six minutes to crack open the existential dread of AI sentience like an egg on a hot pavement. Turing Test, written and directed by Jaschar Marktanner, does more with its lean runtime than many bloated techno-thrillers manage with a feature length and a dozen rewrites. It understands that the anxiety of artificial intelligence lies not in the fear of destruction, but in the disquieting thought that we might not notice when it becomes indistinguishable from us.

Set in a sterile, purgatorial room that feels equal parts IKEA showroom and THX-1138 homage, the film centres on Sophie (Marlene Fahnster) as she preps Alan (Richard Lingscheidt) for a Turing Test. Their conversation is clipped, affectless, cautious. But something doesn’t add up. There are subtle dissonances: repetitions, minute hesitations, beats that overstay their welcome by half a second. Suspicion builds, not through exposition, but calibration.

The performances walk a carefully ambiguous line. Fahnster and Lingscheidt are both just detached enough to keep you guessing who – or what – might be faking it. Marktanner isn’t really interested in exploring whether AI can pass for human; he seems more fascinated with showing how quickly our certainty about what is human starts to fray when confronted with calculated algorithmic mimicry.

Turing Test is AI as procedural dread, not flashy sci-fi and while it does tip its hand before it ends, it isn’t really about the twist. In a fractured, metatextual way, it’s about humanity’s tendency to project onto artificial or inanimate objects, to imbue our creations with life, personality and, ironically, our own worst instincts to deceive, subvert and control but for all its clinical foreboding, its biggest fictional leap may not be in the emergent sentience or otherwise of its antagonist but in sidestepping the other AI elephant in the real world room: that AI isn’t inevitably destined to be a hyperintelligent threat but that, on current evidence, what humanity is busy throwing trillions of dollars at might be Augmented Ignorance hyped up by snake oil tech bros.