Movie Overview: I Am Mom Confronts the Technopocalypse on an Intimate Scale

The Pitch: A younger woman (Clara Rugaard) is raised in a secret lab/bunker by a maternal robotic named Mom, voiced by Rose Byrne. In line with Mom, a lethal virus has scoured humanity from the Earth, and Daughter — that’s her identify — is the one human left. When she hits these perilous teen years, the pair’s relationship is imperiled not by the onset of puberty, however by the arrival of a mysterious survivor from the floor (Hilary Swank) who claims that it was really a swarm of killer robots that murdered all of the people — robots that simply so occur to look precisely like Mom. As tensions mount, Daughter is pressured to confront the actual fact of her existence, whereas determining who she will actually belief, if anybody.

Robotic Mothers Simply Don’t Perceive: Between the strains of I Am Mom is an existential techno-drama that principally finds the candy spot between philosophy, psychology, and pure Luddism. Daughter’s relationship with Mom is off-putting in some methods — the truth that they solely ever refer to one another as “Mom” and “Daughter” provides their scenes an appropriately uncanny edge — but it surely’s additionally a genuinely candy one. Byrne subtly conveys Mom’s real concern for Daughter’s well-being, which is current whilst tensions between the 2 start to rise. At one level Mom refers to Swank’s character (credited solely as “Lady”) as a “unfavourable affect” on her daughter, sounding extra like a real-live mother then a T-1000.

The movie makes its bones by leaning into ambiguity. As soon as confronted with the Lady’s tales of the floor, Mom instantly admits that her story in regards to the illness was, in her telling, a white lie meant to guard Daughter from the reality. By getting this little bit of narrative enterprise out of the way in which early, I Am Mom is ready to rapidly transfer on to extra fruitful floor. Swank’s efficiency is a key determine on this equation, because the Lady by no means as soon as looks like she’s telling Daughter the whole fact both. Because the scientific technique behind her upbringing — full with classes in utilitarianism and Kant — runs up in opposition to the gritty, hard-edged survivalism of life on the floor, Daughter is confronted with two opposing decisions that appear equally flawed. At the same time as Michael Lloyd Inexperienced’s screenplay (from a narrative by he and director Grant Sputore) slowly reveals its playing cards, it retains these questions open for so long as it may.

I Am Mom (Netflix)

Meeting-Line Imagery: One downside that the screenplay — a former resident of the Black Listing — doesn’t fairly surmount is an inclination towards flat characterizations. That is possible the results of the film’s three essential characters being a teen raised in a take a look at tube, a robotic, and a post-apocalyptic survivor. For distinction, the characters within the equally claustrophobic 10 Cloverfield Lane had been (pretty) regular individuals with lived experiences that they introduced with them into John Goodman’s happy-fun-time bunker. Each movies are knockout locked-room dramas with a paranoid, apocalyptic edge, however every reveals the totally different challenges confronted by these sorts of tales. I Am Mom will make you ponder the very nature of humankind, whereas 10 Cloverfield Lane made you query different individuals.

Whereas Sputore does a bang-up job with ratcheting up the movie’s emotional stakes — the type of work that ought to hopefully internet him future jobs — the movie can also be barely marred by its middling manufacturing design. The bunker has a generic sheen, as if chosen from a Put up-Apocalyptic-Bunker-Laboratories-R-Us. Advances in CGI have additionally created an odd no-man’s land for low-budget style movies like this one, foregrounded by a sure antiseptic polish that’s grow to be a brand new visible shorthand for “B-movie.” The movie lacks any type of signature visible type, or any particularly distinct photos that can stick with you previous the closing credit. Even Mom’s design is generically robotic, and the identical goes for her extra bloodthirsty kin, which Swank’s character refers to as “Dozers.”

The Verdict: Regardless of its sci-fi trappings, I Am Mom is admittedly the type of mid-budget drama that Hollywood has stopped making, leaving shops like Netflix to select up the slack: It favors interpersonal pressure over motion, and concepts over explosions. The movie is nice for far more than consuming up an idle Wednesday night time’s viewing, even when its impressions will fade for a lot of over time. What stands out most of all is a meta-concern: For a film exploring the ramifications of expertise pondering it is aware of what’s finest for humanity, it’s ironic that the majority viewers will solely discover the movie as a result of a Netflix algorithm thinks they’ll prefer it. Like every good what-if story, I Am Mom is uncomfortably near asking “What now?”

The place’s It Enjoying? Now accessible on Netflix.

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