I Am Mother: Possibly the Best Sci-Fi Film of 2019

For much of the film, I Am Mother, keeps its audience trapped in the confined atmosphere of the sterile, sanitized facility where Mother raises her babies, all grown from embryos. Watching the movie, viewers have no knowledge of what’s happening outside in the real world. Clara Rugaard stars as “Daughter”. As she gets opposing stories of the state of the outside world from “Mother” and the mysterious stranger who shows up at their home, viewers are left guessing who is telling the truth.

I Am Mother has the suffocating, claustrophobic atmosphere of John Carpenter’s The Thing, the “what the heck is true” mystery of 10 Cloverfield Lane, and the no hope, dismal dystopic future of The Road. Snagging the coolest aspects of three revered sci-fi movies and rolling them into one really works for this movie as it keeps you on edge and nervous the entire hour and fifty-five-minute run time. That whole time, you feel Daughter is always walking on eggshells that could break at any moment, leaving her in danger for her life. The only question is, which direction will that danger come from?

Clara Rugaard may be a new face to the United States via this Australian Sci-Fi movie, but with a performance like this, I believe we’ll be seeing much more of the Danish actress. Rose Byrne does the voice of Mother, while Hilary Swank plays the stranger. However, Clara is the focus of the plot and carries the movie easily.

Swank comes into the once sealed environment and rattles Daughter, dispelling much of what Mother has said is fact about the outside world. Then, like the audience, Daughter is left completely confused and begins questioning everything she knows. The slow pacing of I Am Mother is ideal for this type of movie as it leaves the viewer plenty of time to question everything they’ve been shown, as Daughter is doing, getting the audience deeply invested in the remainder of the plot.

At this point, the tension ramps up dramatically. Swank blames Mother for all that is happening outside. Mother, meanwhile, seems to want Swank gone at all costs. Daughter is caught in the middle.

Eventually, reality is revealed. Mother isn’t just the robot raising Daughter. She’s the artificial intelligence that destroyed most of humanity in order to save it from destroying itself. Mother, therefore, is every robot. She then uses her robot form to raise children inside the bunker and, outside the bunker, to hunt humans and kill off the few remaining ones. Her goal is to raise humans to be better so that the human race will survive.

The Sci-Fi story of robots taking over the future and destroying humanity has become a sci-fi cliché, but this storyline takes that cliché in a slightly different direction. Instead of the goal of destroying all humanity, Mother wants to kill off all imperfections in humanity by destroying all humans except those she raises. She, of course, feels she can raise humans to not be self-destructive and flawed.

However, as Hilary prompts Daughter to investigate some of Mother’s lies, viewers find out that Daughter isn’t the first human Mother has raised. When other children have been deemed sub par by Mother, she kills them.

Discovering this, Daughter leaves with Hilary only to find she has not been telling the whole truth either. No one in Daughter’s world tells the truth. Naturally, she decides to make her own truth as she takes steps to get away from both “women” in her life while also attempting to save her embryonic brothers and sisters.