I Am Mother is a film that confuses a grave tone with intelligence and moral posturing with thought. After a conveniently unspecified “mass extinction event,” a super-advanced AI, embodied in a humanoid droid that calls itself Mother, decides to rescue humanity by raising one child at a time in total isolation, selecting embryos like products from a warehouse and deciding who is “worthy” of continuing the species. This setup is treated as profound ethical inquiry rather than what it actually is: a catastrophic misreading of what humans are. We are social animals. Remove society and you don’t create virtue - you manufacture pathology.
Mother raises a Daughter inside a sealed bunker that looks less like a sanctuary for humankind and more like a rejected Alien set. Daughter is subjected to endless ethical tests whose purpose is never convincingly explained, since she is supposedly the only human alive. Right on cue, the moment Mother is recharging, a wounded intruder appears: Woman. Like everyone else, she is denied a name, a personality, or the ability to form a coherent explanation. She exists to whisper ominous half-truths and limp meaningfully across the frame.
Despite having no credible reason to trust her, Daughter escapes the bunker, lured by the abstract promise of “other humans.” Outside, she finds a wasteland and the awkward discovery that Woman has been lying - especially about the existence of anyone else. How Woman survives, where her food comes from, and why any of this should make sense are questions the film declines to answer, preferring the bland recipe of vague looks and ominous pauses.
Disappointed by the lack of humanity - and possibly by the absence of men - Daughter returns to the bunker, where she suddenly discovers that Mother has been lying too - about the extinction event, about the presence of other droids, and about earlier embryos that were quietly disposed of when they failed to meet expectations. None of this ultimately matters, because Daughter has “passed the test.” Mother agrees to be destroyed, leaving Daughter in charge of rebooting humanity on her own. This is presented as a triumph, apparently based on the belief that raising multiple infants is a symbolic gesture rather than relentless, mind-breaking labour, and that this time things will work out because the caretaker is female and the embryos suitably inclusive. The messy realities of human conflict, individual failure, and social crisis are waved away in favour of comforting ideological assumptions.
Marketed as “cyberpunk sci-fi,” I Am Mother is in fact a hollow exercise in moral self-congratulation, held together by thin logic and unearned confidence. It wants credit for asking big questions while carefully avoiding the inconvenience of giving logic answers. Humanity may well be flawed - but if this is the proposed upgrade, extinction starts to look less like a tragedy and more like quality control.
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