I Am Mother is a sci-fi thriller about a teenage girl (Clara Rugaard), who is the first of a new generation of humans to be raised by Mother (Rose Byrne), a robot designed to repopulate the earth after the extinction of humankind. I Am Mother is directed by Grant Sputore, and wrote by Michael Lloyd Green.

Without getting too much into the crux of the movie and spoiling it, I Am Mother is centered on three characters. An AI robot, Mother, whose objective is to repopulate Earth, the perfect daughter who grows into a smart, fit, and quite capable young woman, their existence is shattered by the arrival of Wounded Woman (Hilary Swank), who somehow survived the catastrophe of human kind. Wounded Woman has survived from her instincts which have formed a deep mistrust of the AI that has inhabited the world. Wounded woman represents some of the more selfish parts of human traits which considering her current situation of being injured is quite understandable. 

The overarching theme of the movie centred on ethics and the philosophical trolley question which is a question that daughter has to tackle in the movie. The trolley problem is thus: You see a runaway trolley moving toward five incapacitated people lying on the tracks. You are standing next to a lever that controls a switch. If you pull the lever, the trolley will be redirected onto a side track, and the five people on the main track will be saved. However, there is a single person lying on the side track. You have two options: Do nothing and allow the trolley to kill the five people on the main track or pull the lever, diverting the trolley onto the side track where it will kill one person. We see this play out for daughter at the end of the movie whether daughter is aware of the conundrum or not is up to the audience to decide.  This leads to questions about trust, never knowing who to trust throughout the movie and when we do make a choice is it from our head, or from our heart, or from our gut?

Some parts of the movie gets lost shifting complex ideas to sometimes over the top, over the top insofar as how this movie had been moving, sequences that distracted from the overall ideas that the movie was trying to get across in an attempt to subvert the audiences expectations. Overall I am Mother was a well delivered movie

I Am Mother is currently streaming on Netflix.

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