Mother/Android (2021)

Mother/Android arrives as a lean post-apocalyptic thriller from first-time director Mattson Tomlin, who transplanted his own adoption story into a robot uprising and came away with something that mostly works as a survival procedural. Chloë Grace Moretz plays Georgia, pregnant and trudging through the woods toward a fortified Boston, and the film's emotional engine is her ambivalence about motherhood. That ambivalence gives the picture a female-centered core. It never turns into a political argument about anything, which is either a relief or a missed opportunity depending on your appetite for such things. The couple at the center is interracial, and Algee Smith's Sam is a sturdy, unremarkable presence. Race is never mentioned. This is the sort of casting that reads as ordinary rather than as a statement, and there is something to be said for that.

The androids come from a company called Raster Robotics, which is as close as the film gets to an economic critique. It is not close. There is no boardroom villain, no speech about automation and labor, no reckoning with the corporation that built the machines. The machines simply revolt. Similarly, the pregnancy is treated as stakes, not as subject matter. Georgia's body is a clock, not a thesis. Viewers hoping for commentary on bodily autonomy or self-image will find only contractions and a C-section.

The rest is a chase. The film moralizes little and preaches not at all, which in this climate feels almost quaint. Tomlin's personal investment shows in the quieter passages, and most of all in the ending, where a mother gives up her child for a better life. The execution is uneven. The world-building is thin. But the picture knows what it is: a modest genre exercise with a sentimental heart. There are worse things to be.