‘I Am Mother’ on Netflix Pulls Off a Thrilling Sci-Fi Plot with a Three-Person Cast

If there’s any sliver of a silver lining to the impending climate-change apocalypse, it’s that screenwriters of post-apocalyptic films need little to no exposition to convince us their world is plausible. Writer Michael Lloyd Green and director Grant Sputore certainly used that to their advantage in I Am Mother, a new sci-fi thriller coming to Netflix on Friday.

I Am Mother opens with a title card that reads, “Days Since Extinction Event: 001,” before launching us into its storyline: A robot called Mother and her human child called Daughter live together alone in an underground laboratory, safe from the supposedly contaminated outside world. While Mother toils away on her embryos, hoping to bring the human race back into existence, Daughter gets lessons on things like philosophy, where she debates, in a bit of admittedly on-the-nose dialogue, the true value of a human life. Then, one day, an injured human woman shows up at their facility’s door, leading Daughter to question everything Mother has taught her to believe.

The play-like, three-person I Am Mother cast adds to this wonderful simplicity: Rose Byrne as the voice of Mother, Clara Rugaard as the daughter, and Hilary Swank as the Wounded Woman. (The list does get a bit longer if you include stunt actor Luke Hawker, who plays the person inside Mother’s robot suit, and young actors Hazel Sandery and Summer Lenton, who briefly plays Daughter in her toddler years, but still.) With only three characters, there’s not much need for an excessive amount of dialogue, leaving room both for a haunting score from Dan Luscombe and for me to check my phone, which, like it or not, is a factor more filmmakers might do well to consider these days.

Given this uncluttered set-up, it’s doubly impressive that Sputore successfully builds tension for almost two hours, which is in no small part thanks to the meticulously-detailed bunker, from production designer Hugh Bateup, and the simple-yet-unnerving robot suit, which Hawker helped design. Green, who appeared on the 2016 Black List for this film, smartly centers the stakes of his script not on the typical questions of the apocalypse—what caused it, can it be reversed, how to survive it, etc—but instead on Daughter’s personal dilemma: Who can she trust? The robot mother who raised her, or the stranger of her same species?

Byrne does her part with a solid voice performance—an airy-yet-precise delivery that immediately makes you suspicious of Mother’s true motives. Rugaard, who previously had a small role in 2018’s Teen Spirit, is compelling as the wide-eyed innocent trying to do the right thing, while Swank gives her best to a character that doesn’t give much back: The grim, tells-it-like-it-is rebel whose motives are never fully explained. It’s here that the beautiful simplicity of the film becomes a drawback, culminating in a confusing ending that I had to watch three times to understand, and an unclear moral message that may or may not be anti-abortion.

Still, I was pleasantly surprised by this Netflix original’s careful, deliberate pacing, especially considering that so many Netflix films, almost without fail, feel like they were slapped together in three weeks or less, with varying degrees of success. It likely helps that I Am Mother was not produced by Netflix, but acquired by the streaming service after its world premiere at Sundance in January. Had I seen I Am Mother at Sundance—with films like The Farewell and The Last Black Man in San Francisco—maybe I’d feel less charitable toward it, but amid the recent Netflix disappointments like Wine Country and Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile, it feels like a breath of fresh air.

Stream I Am Mother on Netflix