I Am Mother (2019) - Movie Review

A woman is born in an underground bunker. It is the only life she’s ever known and her caretaker, a robot named Mother, is the only other being she’s ever encountered. Enter another woman from the outside world, one ravaged by an extinction-level event, who finds her way to the bunker. As the two humans interact, what is shared between them makes the first woman question what Mother has been telling her. In light of this dilemma, what does the first woman do?

The world of economics and psychology is built on hypotheticals like this, ones designed to make humans question how other humans act in specific circumstances, whether they’re driven by self-interest, curiosity or even self-destructive behaviour. It also forms the main plot of this film, the first in many ethical riddles that show the filmmakers doing an extraordinary amount with seemingly little.

Taking place primarily within the bunker, with only three characters (Mother, Daughter and the woman from outside), it utilizes a similar mode of sci-fi scriptsploitation as Alex Garland’s Ex Machina, using very few visual tricks and mostly dialogue and performance to delve into incredibly complicated scenarios to do with humanity’s connection to technology and to itself.

However, one of the things that doesn’t translate directly when it comes to these ethics hypotheticals is the barrier between logical probability and human rationality. Hell, the entire practical basis of these questions is predicated on the idea that the people involved are rational and capable of making their own decisions. It isn’t exactly a groundbreaking critique to say that humans are many things, but reliably rational isn’t one of them. It’s the difference between something like the Prisoner Dilemma as a hypothetical scenario, and actually putting it into practice, as two University of Hamburg economists did in February earlier this year.

On one side, we have Daughter, played with phenomenal efficacy by Clara Rugaard. Mother has trained her to think along these ethical lines, proffering thought experiments like Judith Jarvis Thomson’s Transplant Problem to weigh up her ability to look at ‘the bigger picture’ and preserve as much sacred human life as possible. And on the other, we have the woman from outside, played with remarkable nuance by Hillary Swank, who has seen what the robots have done to the outside world and, most importantly, how they’ve dealt with the presence of humans. Both find themselves in need of social interaction, same as any other human, and while their own internal debates fuel a lot of the film’s drama, it takes on a new dimension when put into context with the title character.

Between Rose Byrne’s eerie vocal performance, Luke Hawker’s effective physical performance within the robot suit, and the suit itself supplied by special effects wizards Weta, Mother represents a lot of best- and worst-case scenarios in regard to the relationship between man and machine. As previous classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey have shown, there are few things more unnerving than the idea of an artificial intelligence with the capacity to lie.

And when combined with Michael Lloyd Green’s amazing scripting, constantly drip-feeding the audience clues to what’s going on without outright declaring any of it, the story nestles into a highly complex moral labyrinth in terms of figuring out whether this caretaker is as truly benevolent as it lets on. What makes things trickier is that, much like 10 Cloverfield Lane, the true thrills come out of questioning which scenario is worse: The doomsday-addled outside world, or the one inside the bunker.

As someone with a real thirst for this kind of smart yet emotionally-salient science fiction, I am quite impressed with how well this one turned out, and it being an Aussie production only endears me to it even more. I won’t pretend that I’ve dialled down every single nuance to this production, as it’s the kind of fare that seems designed to be re-watched for the retrospective, but with how cleverly it’s presented and how utterly fascinating its ideas are, I see no problem in the idea of watching this again.