High-concept in setup and deliberately constricted in scope, I Am Mother weaves an assured if subtle kind of fascination through its small-scale yet suggestive coming-of-age drama.
Recently released directly to Netflix (you will need a subscription to the streaming service to watch it), I recommend the film to anyone except, perhaps, those in that subset of humanity who are unfortunate enough to delight in nothing whatsoever sci-fi.
The film is set in a future where the human race has finally managed to obliterate itself. The good news, though, is that somebody foresaw the possibility and planned ahead. Shortly after the “extinction event,” somewhere far beneath the wreckage, the machinery of a so-called “repopulation facility” whirs into life. An anthroform robot pulls a refrigerated human embryo from the stack and sets about rebooting the species.
The action of the story follows the coming of age of this first child, referred to simply as “Daughter,” under the care of the machine she has learned to regard as “Mother.” When a visitor disrupts the quiet round of her education from the outside world she has been taught is thoroughly contaminated and evacuated of humanity, Daughter faces a crisis of confidence in some of the basic tenets of her world.
Could Mother have been lying all along? Might this stranger have ulterior motives in trying to convince her of the violence and ruthlessness of the artificially intelligent machines she derisively calls “dozers”?
Like many postapocalyptic films, I Am Mother clears away many of the distracting surface features of contemporary social life to zero down on its fundamental building blocks: in this case, pre-eminently, the risk and necessity of trust.
On the eve of adulthood, Daughter must make a choice characteristic of her archetypal name: eventually, like all adolescents in an imperfect world, she must choose whether to revert to complete reliance upon the one who has nurtured, sheltered, and perhaps even intentionally misled her, or to strike out into a probably dangerous unknown in the company of an alluring if unsettling stranger.
The drama then is as close to home as every invitation to leave it.
In addition to the primary interest of its very human (if sparsely populated) story, therefore, the film also brings with it other interests, both technical and thematic. Beautifully photographed and well-paced, it remains consistently interesting to the eye amid the steady ratcheting up of the dramatic tension. The film also attends well to its titular theme and obliquely considers even religious angles on motherhood through allusions to the Rosary and visual recollections of Madonna with child.
Solidly constructed, stimulating, and suggestive, then, if a fault is to be found with the film it might be for its open-endedness. No spoilers here, but with a conclusion less tidy than some might prefer, the viewing will probably leave a tickle in the mind good for post-popcorn discussion-scratching.
One may not fully sympathize with some of the film’s underlying assumptions – for instance, on things like human embryos, reproductive technologies, and the basic composition of human families.
Yet perhaps, in an age when many persons’ opinions on such matters are formed in environments completely disengaged from religion, there could ultimately be some worthwhile common ground, or at least some points of contact, found in this work of art, which attempts, however inconclusively, to imagine some positive possibilities for both.
(Originally published in The B.C. Catholic)