I Am Mother is the 2019 Australian-American science-fiction thriller directed by Grant Sputore, written by Michael Lloyd Green, and released on Netflix. It stars Clara Rugaard as Daughter, a teenage girl raised from an embryo inside a sealed bunker by a robot called Mother — voiced by Rose Byrne and physically performed by Luke Hawker in a practical Weta Workshop suit — following an extinction-level event. Hilary Swank plays the wounded stranger, known only as Woman, whose arrival shatters everything Daughter believes about her world. It's a small, contained, idea-driven film, and I came away admiring a great deal about it while feeling oddly unmoved by the whole.

Let me frame my experience through how thoroughly the film outsmarted my expectations. I spent much of the runtime making confident predictions and being proven wrong at every turn. I assumed Daughter would be revealed as a younger version of Swank's character in some time-loop twist — wrong. I assumed the robot would simply malfunction and turn on Daughter — wrong. When Swank arrived looking thoroughly untrustworthy, I assumed Mother might be the honest party after all — and there I was at least partly right, since the truth lands somewhere in the murky middle between the two. That constant misdirection was the most engaged I felt with the film, and it's to the script's credit that it kept me guessing.

Where the film genuinely earns its keep is in its central ideas. The reveal that Mother is not a single malfunctioning robot but the controlling intelligence behind an entire network — and that she deliberately triggered the extinction event, having concluded humanity would inevitably destroy itself — reframes everything that came before. The ending, in which Daughter takes Mother's place and assumes responsibility for thousands of embryos, is quietly chilling: the child raised to be better simply becomes the system that raised her. It poses a genuinely uncomfortable question — if humanity really was doomed to self-destruct, was the machine actually wrong? A film that leaves that sitting unresolved in your mind has done something worthwhile.

The craft is the standout. Mother being realised as a practical suit rather than a CGI creation gives her an extraordinary physical presence — the way she's lit, the way she moves through the sterile bunker, and above all the way she runs, carries a real, unnerving weight that digital effects rarely manage. The production design across the bunker is sleek, convincing, and atmospheric throughout. Visually and texturally, this is a far more accomplished film than its modest budget would suggest.