Movie Review : I am Mother (2019) — Dead End Follies

* this review contains spoilers *

In 2019, science fiction movies have become the preferred pop culture vessel to discuss philosophical questions. They’re what post-apocalypse movies were six years ago. Films like Arrival, Blade Runner 2049, Ex Machina and Annihilation made intelligent sci-fi sexy, giving birth to an aesthetic of what’s considered to be deep: few characters, interaction with robots or foreign species, a desire to be understood parallels the protagonist’s existential loneliness. If your movie has that, critics are going to call it “thought provoking.” In that sense, I am Mother is kind of deep.

It just… you know, it has weird ideas.

I am Mother tells the story of a lonely robot (Rose Byrne), who’s programmed to create a better world after an extinction event took place. She’s the titular mother of this new world. She’s in charge of countless human embryos, but inexplicably raises only one daughter (Clara Rugaard) with whom she has a complicated relationship. The human girl is growing curious of her origins and what lies outside the weird lab they live in. Before long, it’s the outside that comes barging in and the precarious relationship between Mother and her daughter is completely destroyed.

This is not a movie about “what it means to be human” or whatever traditional profound science fiction is about. It’s a movie about motherhood. The timing of I am Mother’s release is interesting, because we’re in the middle of a cultural revolution where we’re rethinking traditional gender roles and, among others, the necessity for women to bear children. But the movie’s statement here is the following one: motherhood is necessary for the survival on mankind. Women need to bear children and raise them properly, because bad, overbearing mothers are autocrats.

No, it’s not just you. This is a little fucked up.