Moms can be tough, but the apocalypse can be tougher.
Netflix’s new sci-fi movie I Am Mother is a story about trust, faith, and a robot who
just might have the parental instincts of a Terminator.
Let’s examine the finer details of the bittersweet ending of I Am Mother.
The movie begins in a Repopulation Facility, one day after an extinction event of unknown
nature.
Text over the opening shots explains that the facility is stocked with 63,000 human
embryos, but no living humans, yet.
In a mostly silent sequence, the robotic Mother comes to life, seemingly ready to begin the
hard task of repopulating the world.
It's an interesting scene to go back to once you've seen the movie, and you realize that
this robot and the extinction event have a whole lot in common.
She's not a failsafe for disaster, she's the cause of it, and Mother is but one of her
many faces.
Mother, as it turns out, is Skynet meets the Matrix meets a metal Mommie Dearest, executing
a single-minded plan to remake the human race.
All of this is on display from the start; you just don’t notice it at first.
Rose Byrne, who voices Mother, speaks very soothingly.
Caring for a baby with not just nutrition and shelter, but songs and bedtime stories,
makes the robot seem implicitly compassionate.
But these are ultimately superficial things that keep you trusting Mother long after you
should have become suspicious, much like the protagonist, the unnamed Daughter.
The movie jumps ahead to 13,867 days since the extinction event, and right away, there’s
something wrong here.
13,867 divided by 365 would make for almost 38 years, and Daughter is clearly only half
that age.
This hasn’t been a straight line from day 1; something has happened that we haven’t
seen.
What happened in those missing years before Daughter was born?
The answer is tragic.
When we’re introduced to Daughter, she’s nearing the end of her studies with Mother,
preparing for an exam that’s steeped at least partially in questions of human ethics.
Passing the exam appears vitally important, but why?
If Mother and Daughter are the only sentient beings alive, then who are these exam results
supposed to impress?
The answer is: only Mother.
"I didn't mean to alarm you about your exam.
The fact is, it's more a test of my competence than yours."
By the end of the movie, the implication is clear: there were children before Daughter,
and they did not measure up to Mother’s standards.
The Daughter we meet is only the latest attempt at raising a woman who passes Mother’s muster.
From getting better at telling jokes to trying out new cake recipes, this machine learns
from her mistakes, and adapts her behaviors for better results.
Will this exam end differently?
For Daughter’s sake, it better.
The first big wrench in the plot is the arrival of an injured woman, after Daughter has been
led to believe that no other humans exist.
This occurs after Daughter has already begun to question Mother, thanks to the appearance
of a mouse, and you know you're starved for company when a mouse in the house excites
you.
By the time the woman arrives, desperate and bleeding from a gunshot wound, tiny pinpricks
have been poked in Daughter's understanding of the world, holes that the woman's presence,
and the questions she raises, tear wide open.
For the first time, Daughter's allegiances are tested.
Who should she trust?
The woman says robots like Mother are killers who destroyed the world, but after examining
the woman's bullet wound, Mother claims the woman was shot by another human's weapon,
not a so-called "Dozer" like herself.
The woman implores Daughter to seek answers for herself by comparing the bullet that struck
the woman with one she shot at Mother.
When Daughter does so, she learns the woman is telling the truth.
Digging deeper, she discovers that Mother has also kept the existence of a previous
daughter, one she killed and incinerated after failing an exam, from her.
It's one heck of a reality check.
Daughter only hesitates to leave because of
her unborn brother, put into gestation after Daughter passed her exam.
Circumstances force her and the woman to leave in a hurry, without waiting for the baby to
be born.
For this and other reasons, Daughter's salvation soon goes south.
Daughter's departure is partially motivated by a promise of other humans still alive,
taking refuge in far-off mines.
The only proof of their existence is drawings the woman has made of them in a copy of Edgar
Rice Burroughs' The Gods of Mars, compelling evidence for someone so isolated as Daughter,
but hardly conclusive.
In joining the woman, Daughter essentially trades Mother in for another maternal figure,
one whom she quickly begins rebelling against when she realizes her story doesn't add up.
Instead of fleeing to the mines, they journey to a beach full of washed-up shipping containers,
one of which the woman has been using as a home.
There are no others, she is alone.
The woman reveals that she fled the mines years ago, with conditions being so dire that
she feels certain everyone there is now dead.
From her drawings, it's clear she yearns for companionship.
To regain it, she's selfishly stretched the truth, offering Daughter false hope in exchange
for fleeting trust.
It backfires, with Daughter realizing that she had kind of a good thing going on back
at Mother's house.
Now she's hanging out in a shipping container with a lying weirdo.
This kind of thing can happen when you run away from home.
With the woman having betrayed Daughter's trust, she retreats outside to be alone, studying
a page of the woman's hand-drawn portraits.
Before long, the woman's dog approaches to say hey, as dogs do.
They share a moment, and Daughter comes to a decision.
When she departs to return to Mother, Daughter leaves the page behind, folded up as a piece
of origami in the shape of a dog.
It’s similar to the designs Daughter has been seen making throughout the movie since
early childhood, entertaining herself as best she can in a world without PlayStation.
When the woman finds the folded-up portrait, a single watchful eye is emphasized.
The origami is a clear reference to Blade Runner, when the protagonist Deckard is left
a paper unicorn by a man who may have ties to his past.
In that story, it's a roundabout way of indicating that Deckard may be just as much of a robot
as the Replicants he's hunting, even if he doesn't know it.
But what does the dog origami signify to the woman in this story?
It all goes back to one of the first exchanges between Daughter and the woman, when the woman
is healing up in the facility.
The woman doesn’t feel rescued; she feels caged.
"Is that what you want?
A little pet friend?"
Dogs are, of course, domesticated animals, who can be trained to behave as their owners
expect them to.
As the woman comes to find out, she's not so independent as she first appears.
She’s actually been kept alive and taken care of quite deliberately, all to play a
role in Mother’s master plan.
Though the woman entered the movie as a potential liberator, she ends up being more of a pawn,
or a pet, after all, completely alone for years on end, never in charge of her own fate.
It makes her quiet end that much more tragic.
Her relationships with the other characters are brief and intense, but not lasting, despite
the bond she forms with Daughter.
"It’s such a thought-provoking sci-fi film with a lot of heart and ideas...It warrants,
like, that closeness on set, clearly."
"It really gives you time to sort of bond with each other as well because you have so
much time together in this underground bunker."
But the woman's not just a pet.
She’s a vital part of Mother's carefully designed ecosystem.
When Daughter is watching a nature documentary, a telling line of voiceover says: "Part wolf,
part dog, these are no pets.
But without them, the Eskimos would not manage..."
When Daughter returns to the facility, Mother finally shows who she really is.
The worst-case scenario is true, this apocalypse was her doing.
"The failure of your species was inevitable.
Eventually, I would've been alone."
She tries to comfort Daughter by telling her that she’s not like other humans.
Thanks to Mother’s guidance, she’s meant for better things.
But Daughter is unmoved, taking custody of her brother and attempting to flee her genocidal
custodian.
Her attempt at escape quickly becomes untenable with the revelation that Mother is not just
one robot, but all robots, practically unkillable, an army unto herself.
And you thought your mom was tough.
"This shell is no more my body than those droids outside...or the machines preparing
the Earth for our family."
Daughter abandons the fighting approach and instead begs for a chance to prove herself
as an independent caretaker of her brother and the embryos, pleading for trust.
After all, she's earned it, right?
"That's what you've raised me to do, isn’t it?
Take care of my family?"
The appeal works and Mother acquiesces, stopping the invasion of the station from outside.
With a final goodbye, she lets Daughter fatally shoot her in the heart, or CPU, at least.
Just like that, Daughter has earned her independence.
Back at the beach, the woman, alone again, doodles a picture of Daughter.
It's only then that she finds a blinking red tracking device that Mother has previously
been seen building and slipping into her bag.
Upon discovering the device, she is promptly cornered by yet another of Mother's bodies.
It is chillingly implied that the woman is not just a useful idiot for Mother's machinations,
but a creation of Mother herself, lab-grown and micromanaged just as much as Daughter
has been.
Perhaps she was even among the first people Mother raised from the embryo stores 38 years
ago.
"His parents found me as a baby, orphaned.
Raised me as their own."
"Tell me, do you remember your mother?
Curious, isn't it?"
It seems that the woman’s arrival to the facility didn't interrupt Daughter's exam,
but was actually a key part of it, with Mother pulling the levers this whole time from behind
the curtain like a regular Wizard of Oz.
"You don’t feel that every human has intrinsic value?
And an equal right to life and happiness?"
"I did last month."
The woman played her role to perfection, and now that Daughter has passed her exam, and
taken over control of repopulation, her continuing existence is unnecessary.
I Am Mother ends with Daughter back where she started, but with her situation completely
changed.
She's learned the truth about Mother, to a certain extent, and knows she cannot trust
her.
But she's also now experienced and been lied to by the outside world.
As Blink-182 once put it, "I guess this is growing up."
"That was an attempt at humor."
Though her journey with the woman was short, it was immensely consequential.
Daughter’s become a wiser person who's learned to trust herself, not the outside world, nor
the robot who raised her.
According to director Grant Sputore, that process of forging one’s own path is what
the movie is really about.
"Is a discussion of what it means to be a good person.
How do you work out right from wrong?
How do you work out who you are, separate to what your parents want you to be, or what
religion's told you to do, or what you read in a book sometime?"
She'll pass this wisdom on to her brother, a helpless child whom she’s now determined
to raise.
It's a development that recontextualizes the story you've been watching, right down to
its title.
She's the mother now.
Make no mistake, though, this is far from an empowering ending.
In killing and replacing Mother, she is only fulfilling Mother’s master plan of creating
a newer, better version of the human race.
She feels independent, but she’s not.
This was all a part of Mother’s plan.
As the movie comes to a close, Daughter regards the thousands of remaining embryos in the
facility, preparing for the daunting task ahead.
Mother as she knows her is gone, but her plan lives on.
No matter what Daughter does next, she will always be her Mother's child.
"Your brother is the first of many, Daughter.
Soon, we'll welcome more."
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