First look at Adelaide-produced robot thriller I Am Mother

Filmed on an Adelaide soundstage, the feature debut of Australian director Grant Sputore is a sleek, intense addition to the ever popular genre of ‘End Of The World Films That Are Actually About Family’ (see The Quiet Place, Bird Box and the Flinders Ranges-filmed Cargo). An incomplete version of the film was screened at last year’s Adelaide Film Festival, who partly funded the project, before being picked up by Netflix in February following its international debut at Sundance.

The trailer fleshes out the film’s plot of a young girl (Clara Rugaard) raised from an embryo by an android guardian named ‘Mother’, voiced by Rose Byrne. Surrounded by polished steel, neon lighting and an exclusively red wardrobe (juxtaposition, people), the pair lead a peaceful if depressingly isolated existence of origami, colouring in, rowing machine sessions and uncomfortable questions about the fate of the human race. A contagion has, supposedly, left the planet lifeless save for a stockpile of frozen embryos.

This unconventional family unit is thrown into disarray by the arrival of Swank, another human who is decidedly not dead. More worryingly, the story told by her robotic counterpart might not be 100% true, and the trailer’s switch to a Hans Zimmer-esque drone score and ominous shots of endless ranks of identical robots certainly invokes a sense of Terminator-inspired doom.

All will be revealed when I Am Mother lands on Netflix on June 7. For international audiences at least – the film will receive an Australian theatrical release a month later from July 18 through Studio Canal.

Header image:
Netflix