I Am Mother

Details: MPAA Rating: TV-14

Cast: Rose Byrne, Clara Rugaard, Hilary Swank

Release Date: June 7, 2019

Official Sundance release poster

Synopsis: After humanity is wiped out, an AI is programmed to act as a mother to a little girl in an underground bunker. After a wounded stranger enters their safe haven, she shows the little girl that maybe her “Mother” isn’t who she says she is.

Pros: Ever since this movie was released at the Sundance Film Festival, there has been constant buzz about the film. Every one was talking about how there was a movie about a robot that made you question everything about human ethics and I was ready to see if it lived up to the hype. After watching the movie I still can’t definitively decide if I liked the movie. The acting was fantastic. Clara Rugaard does an excellent job playing timid, intelligent, and ambitious, Daughter (yes her name is literally Daughter), and Hilary Swank does an even better job playing ferocious, cold-hearted, Woman (once again, her name is literally Woman). Even Rose Byrne, who voices a robot, does a great job creating a safe atmosphere that you feel around Mother, even though she’s a robot. Another positive thing I can say about this film is that it does make you think. After I finished the movie, I had to go outside of the hotel room I was staying in, and take a couple of laps just to comprehend what I saw. After watching I am Mother, you really start to question the ethics of what the robots and what the humans were doing? Is what they were doing right? Do the ends really justify the means? Ultimately, this is what a movie should do! It should spark conversation amongst others in the surrounding community. It should connect people through common ideas and I think I am Mother does deliver in those aspects.

Cons: While this film does deliver on many things, it doesn’t deliver on some key essentials a movie needs to have. Although I said that a movie should make you think, I feel like the directors spent far too much time filling the plot with many plot twists that get confusing after a while. A good director can create plot twists, but a great one can make people understand them and incorporate them in a story in such a way that it doesn’t disturb the flow of the movie. The movie also is so slow-paced. The first two acts is an extremely slow character arc building that I felt could have been done in a solid ten minutes using the simple montage used in the beginning of the film. Instead, the directors wasted a solid 45-50 minutes building a character arc that gets completely wrecked anyways. Once again, there are some huge plot holes that don’t make sense and the whole movie kind of fell apart in the third act.

Star Rating: 6.5/10

Final Thoughts : Although this movie has superb acting and makes you think, at the end of the day, the movie is extremely slow and has many plot holes that leave you extremely confused.

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