I Am Mother
Directed by Grant Sputore
Produced by Timothy White & Kelvin Munro
Screenplay by Michael Lloyd Green
Starring Clara Rugaard, Luke Hawker, Rose Byrne & Hilary Swank
Intelligent, contemplative science fiction movies are hard to come by. There was The Martian, although the ridiculous Earth-return sequence at the end did Matt Damon no favors. Past that, you have to go all the way back to Moon, a 2009 effort with a superb performance by Sam Rockwell.
So I Am Mother is an unexpected delight. Intelligent, suspenseful, and truly good science fiction.
A girl (Clara Rugaard, looking about 16 for the role) plays Daughter. There has been a world-wide catastrophe of some sort, and she is in a large underground bunker with Mother, an android. (Bodysuited beautifully by Luke Hawker and voiced by Rose Byrne). There also some 63,000 embryos in storage. Mother tells Daughter that the catastrophe on the surface has eliminated all life on Earth and made life impossible for many years to come. Daughter eventually asks why, with 63,000 potential people in storage, she’s the only one who has been hatched. Mother replies that she needed to learn how to raise a child properly before taking on more than one.
Then a rat shows up. Daughter captures it, and Mother promptly incinerates it over Daughter’s strenuous objections. We learn two things from this: there is life outside the bunker, and Mother is definitely not human.
Mother, beautifully voiced and animated, has a subtlety of design that Grant Sputore takes full advantage of. The single eye is often a hard closeup on screen, and after a while you begin to think of Dave, from 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is a semicircle under the eye, and two points of light which can move about on the semicircle. The lights move toward the terminus of the arc, and it is, very subtly, a robotic smile. It’s not very evident, just there to be noticed — or not.
Then another human (Hilary Swank), injured by a gunshot, shows up. She is known simply as Woman. And the mystery deepens.
Like all good suspense mysteries, clues are carefully laid out, and chances are you’ll notice most of them, but still only guess at part of the resolution.
For someone who basically was raised in a cave by a robot, Daughter is almost preternaturally adaptable and emotionally resilient, and quickly comes to terms with utterly foreign concepts and events. It turns out that there is a reason for that. Trust the story.
This is a movie that seems certain to garner a cult following and for all the right reasons. Beautifully told, it is a very human story—yes, even Mother in her own way.
Now on Netflix.