WASHINGTON --- ARE women necessary?

Not with Ava around.

Even without hair on her head or flesh on her legs, Ava has enough allure and cunning to become a classic film noir robot vixen.

Despite being a plastic and mesh gizmo locked in a glass cell, she can enmesh men with frightening ease.

Ava is the appealing heroine, or apocalyptic villainess, of “Ex Machina,” a stylish sci-fi thriller set in the near future, written and directed by Alex Garland, a 44-year-old Brit who wrote the 2002 zombie hit “28 Days Later.”

Critics are divided over whether “Ex Machina” is a feminist fable or misogynistic nightmare. Like Quentin Tarantino with violence, Garland has it both ways: He offers a mocking meditation on the male obsession with man-pleasing female sex robots while showing off an array of man-pleasing female sex robots.

Ava, played with a delicate edge by the Swedish actress and dancer Alicia Vikander, is far more than a “basic pleasure model,” as some female replicants in “Blade Runner” are known. She has wiles that are a lot more potent than the weaponized breasts of Austin Powers’s fembots.

Her Dr. Frankenstein is an abrasive Steve Jobs-type named Nathan, played by a hypnotic Oscar Isaac.

“Is it strange to have made something that hates you?” Ava icily asks Nathan.

Nathan has a peach-fuzz coder in his firm, Caleb, fly to his hideaway in Alaska to test whether the curvy artificial-intelligence machine can outwit a nerdy human. It quickly becomes clear that Caleb, in the great film noir tradition of love-struck saps, is going to have a tough time with this silicon femme fatale. Nathan devilishly confides that Ava has a sexual “opening with a concentration of sensors” and admits that he modeled her appearance on Caleb’s online porn history.

Garland has said that it’s “tricky” to assign gender to robots because it raises questions about whether sexuality is a component of consciousness, and he has called Ava’s femininity purely external. But, given how much her looks and charms drive the movie, he told me that it feels “oddly wrong” to call Ava “it.”

Indeed, he confesses to having “a sort of crush” on his creation, and answers “No” a bit too quickly when I ask whether we should assume that Nathan, who lives alone in his glass house with his android Galateas, has had sex with Ava.

Does that notion make him jealous?

“Maybe,” he concedes. “That’s not an unreasonable thing to say.”

Asked if he would want a sex robot, the married father of two replies: “Could I imagine falling in love with a robot that was sentient and attractive to me? Well, sure, I could. But do I want a complicated version of a vibrator? No, I don’t. Some people might. I’m not judgmental about it.”

I ask if the movie will enhance the fear of some women that guys are more into the porn stars on their phones than the girls on their arms.

“The thing we desire and think we can’t have we can now shape exactly to the specification of how we want it,” he says. “There’s something incredibly scary about how unstoppable it feels.”

“Ex Machina” arrives in theaters amid a raft of stories about the swift advance in robotics, with everything from investment-banker bots that make stock picks to blueprints for spider-shaped bots that can potentially spy or assassinate.

Some visionaries --- Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak . warn that humans will be superseded by robots, who will soon be smart enough to redesign themselves to become exponentially smarter.

“Will we be the family pets?” Wozniak fretted to The Australian Financial Review.

Garland is not alarmed because he views robot superiority as inevitable. He suggests that we view androids not as our competitors but as our progeny --- or “mind children,” as robotics expert Hans Moravec, who believes they will be their own species, calls them.

Garland talks about all the things, including government programs, that would run more smoothly with an A.I. in charge. Can he can envision an A.I. president, even more sleek and less emotive than the one we have now?

“There could be an A.I. president; there could,” he replies.

Talking about Ava being programmed to Caleb’s porn preferences, I tell Garland that this is a scary scene, given all the Julian Assanges of the world who are eager to spill our most private exchanges. He says he’s more worried about surreptitious humans than sentient robots and noted that Nathan’s “dude-bro” speak is a metaphor for how tech companies lure us into divulging our lives.

“It’s like your hipster best friend that you aspire to, which is often how these companies market themselves,” he says. “They’re your mate, your buddy. ‘Now let’s go to this club; let’s hang out.’ And a sense that the familiarity of that is just pulling your attention away from the fact that they’re going through your address book and recording everything in there. And every now and then, pulling a dollar bill out of your wallet and going, ‘Dude, hey.’ ”

As we part, I ask Garland what will end humanity first, zombies or robots?

“Neither,” he says. “We will. We’re going to manage that perfectly without any help from zombies or robots.”