Netflix has once again surprised with ‘I am Mother’, a very simple science fiction film but with great symbolic and effective power.
‘I am Mother’ is a movie of biblical proportions: whenever we talk about what makes us human we are dealing with one of the most important issues in the history of thought. In this Netflix bet we witness the rebirth of a human race that has been exterminated and now comes back to life through a girl.
This girl, whose name we never know (she is called Daughter / Hija all the time) is raised by a robot that takes care of her since she selects her from some test tubesfuturistic until she is a teenager with questions to answer. Madre / Mother (the name of the robot for the girl) is severe but kind and instructs her Daughter in everything she has to know to become a good human.
However, there are several conditions that make the life of this strange family even more strange. In addition to being a robot and a human, they are isolated in a room safe from the outside world that destroyed humanity . There the girl watches old TV shows like ‘The Tonight Show’, she studies hard (we will see that she has brutal medical and electronic knowledge), solves moral problems (a variant of the train dilemma) and exercises. The daughter is being raised healthy, strong and, maybe, happy. As happy as can be locked up with a robotEven if you haven’t known anything else.
Mother teaching Daughter | Netflix
From the incubator to the brutal reality
All this stable situation comes crashing down when Hija / Daughter begins to suspect that something strange is going on when she discovers a mouse inside her large-scale incubator. A mouse
? Hadn’t all traces of life on the face of the Earth disappeared?
This, added to certain strange behaviors of a Mother who, until now, had controlled everything with perfect timing, gives the young human woman pause.
Some doubts that grow, accelerate and germinate when a woman appears at the door of the bunker (yes, you have guessed it, it is about Hillary Swank playing Hillary Swank for the fourteenth time) that turns everything upside down.
The growth process of Hija/Daughter is wonderfully well narrated and, despite being a routine and even repetitive process, at no time is it heavy for the viewer. The director, Grant Sputore, fulfills the role of making an attractive film with two and a half characters and a single environment. Things like that distinguish good storytellers.
I say that the first part is enjoyable because what comes from there is a change of revolutions in the plot. Since Swank’s arrival nothing is stable again.
This ‘I am Mother’ is a well-thought-out and very well-told moviethat makes us wonder things, surprises and even excites (something complicated in certain science fiction). The film explores the relationship and conflicts between mother and daughter (which affect us all), between the self and “God” and those that arise from us against ourselves as we grow up.
Netflix makes us think with ‘I am Mother’. | Netflix.
Not so far from ‘I am Mother’
Beyond the plot between science fiction and the story of growth, are we so far from what ‘I am Mother’ proposes?
Daughter/Daughter is raised in solitude by a robot that gives her all the knowledge in the world and that it teaches everyone… The children of those of us who still don’t have them, or perhaps our grandchildren… won’t they study only through machinesIf there are already those who voluntarily reject human contact to lock themselves in their room, what will come in the future will be much more exaggerated.
Perhaps it could be something exaggerated but, in the same way that it is impossible to watch the movie without stopping to think about the loneliness of the human being, the relationship with “what is up there” and the relationship with technology, what would happen to humans?
Would we design the robots, the AI behind them
, how responsible are we for the bad things that can happen to us
, how much control do we have of what we are and what we do here
? These questions and many more arise ‘I am Mother’, one of the latest Netflix productions and one of the most interesting of recent times. Even if I don’t always get itwhen Netflix gets it right with its original productions, it embroiders it .
‘I am Mother’ deserves a chance, no doubt.
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