Metacritic reviews

Netflix's I Am Mother is an engaging sci-fi thriller-meets-coming of age drama, with three strong lead performances.

As twists start to pile on, I Am Mother shifts from eerie to tedious, but there’s too much on display to outright dismiss.

I Am Mother mostly satisfies as another example of smart and slick indie sci-fi.

I Am Mother doesn’t plumb the potential weirdness of [its] premise, and it’s working in a well-worn genre without breaking much new ground. But it effectively dramatizes our perennial love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence.

Were it not for Mother’s telegenic exo-skeleton, which whirrs with every little maneuver, the film would be little more than a talky, over-stuffed mess of tropes better exercised elsewhere.

So many truly disturbing revelations pile up in the final half hour or so that processing the relevant information leaves little time for raw emotion. Swank’s nameless character, in particular, remains a pencil sketch. Still, there’s no question that Sputore can direct a movie.

Mostly I Am Mother is exactly what it seems: a good-looking allegory that postures like it’s wrestling with more ideas than it actually is.

The way it subverts (to say the least) traditional concepts around a parent/child relationship gives it uniqueness and value.

A somewhat cool robot does not make a movie. ... The eventual twists aren’t that surprising and don’t really make sense in the context of even the film’s most basic world building.

The problem is that despite his considerable skills, Sputore is so caught up with the cool technology he loses his grip on both the suspense and the primal human emotions that should be driving this physically imposing but numbingly cold dystopian vehicle.