I Am Mother (2019)
“I Am Mother” (2019) is hard-core science fiction at its best. Netflix is no stranger to the concept; they’ve just never been able to capture it in movie form.
Until now.
The majority of the story is about Mother, an android, and Daughter, the human girl it’s raising.
Names weren’t the strong suit of this production, as the only other named characters are “Brother” and “Woman,” but that’s a very minor thing here.
The premise of the story is that Mother (played by Luke Hawker, voiced by Rose Byrne) is the sole android in charge of restarting the human race in a high-tech compound following an extinction-level event. We watch a montage of Mother raising Daughter (Clara Rugaard) from an embryo to a teen girl, then follow the events and conversations of the teenager.
Mother spoke like a real person. It wasn’t a Siri style voice, or stunted syntax or even Ellen McLain-style GLaDOS shenanigans. Mother acted and spoke exactly like a human mother should. If you simply had Rose Byrne acting the role, you’d wouldn’t have had any problem with it, but seeing a robot do all of the above felt instinctually wrong, which I suppose was the entire point of the doing it that way.
It’s impossible to know how a human would grow up or behave if they were raised by a robot as the only human, so there’s no way to gauge how ‘true to life’ Daughter’s character development was.
Real-life cases of isolated children do not end well, but those are never events where someone was trying to help raise a better child; those were ‘parents’ who should never be within 500 feet of anyone under 18.
It’s never clarified what the extinction-level event was that wiped out humanity, but Mother repeatedly tells Daughter that the surface is irradiated so much that stepping outside would be deadly. It gives it a bit of a “The Island” (2005) feel, if you added a loving version of HAL9000.
Daughter’s world is shattered when a half-crazed Woman (Hilary Swank) manages to make it into the compound and relay her own version of events happening outside. Predictably, this doesn’t sit well with Daughter.
This movie passes the Bechtel Test, because it would be impossible not to. There were only two humans, both women, and a robot that identified with a matronly role.
The soundtrack was solidly ‘eh.’ There were a few moments with something dramatic, or some decent background synth strumming, but nothing that really carried through.
The visual effects, however, were top-notch. I’m pretty sure Mother was Luke Hawker in an LED-coated outfit the entire time. None of the scenes showing Mother ever once led me to think it was CGI. The setting - the high-tech compound they were in - was only shown one room or hallway at a time, so there was never a need to green-screen anyone into a massive, fanciful set. They just filmed exactly where they needed to be, over and over again, to tell the story.
The thing that sold this movie to me was the sheer, unadulterated ambiguity of it.
Normally I don’t like movie that leave more questions than answers, because it often feels like a cop-out for directors and writers to tell a story without spending time doing critical world-building.
But here, that ambiguity was the world-building. The credits rolled and I was hungry for more information about the in-universe events that led up to everything I just saw.
This was absolutely worth my time, and I wish I could go see it in theaters.
If you want to see some truly outstanding science-fiction or wonder what it really means to be a person, take a few hours and watch this.
