I Am Mother

Director: Grant Sputore
Screenwriters: Michael Lloyd Green

Institute History

Description

Shortly after humanity’s extinction, in a high-tech bunker deep beneath the earth’s surface, a robot named Mother commences her protocol. Designed to repopulate the earth with humans born from test-tube embryos, Mother raises a baby girl to become an intelligent, compassionate teenager (Clara Rugaard). But the arrival of a wounded woman (Hilary Swank) at the bunker door soon casts doubt on Mother’s account of the earth’s fate and threatens the unique bond between Mother and her “daughter.”

Grant Sputore’s first feature, I Am Mother is a dazzling, character-driven sci-fi thriller that builds a smart philosophical framework around the “man vs. machine” trope and deftly questions what it means to be human. Based on Michael Lloyd Green’s Black List script, it interrogates Mother’s motivations, and it twists unexpectedly to culminate in a gripping dilemma about who the heroine can trust: a fellow human or the robot who raised her. Voiced by Rose Byrne, Mother is a curiously loving presence in this postapocalyptic story that also explores the imminent age of autonomous and moral machines.

— J.N.

Screening Details

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