Kind machine, terrible mother

myth and science in archetypal images in the film “I Am Mother”

Abstract

We propose a reading of the film I Am Mother (2019), one of Netflix’s most celebrated contemporary fictional productions. Appealing to the concept of archetype, we analyze, through the perspective of cultural myth criticism, how the movie reconfigures the mytheme of the protective mother and also the one of the terrible mother, since the robotic character has an active role defining the heroic types and, therefore, the destiny of humankind. The subject is justified by the trend of the current distribution and consumption of cinema via streaming, which is a lived and effective format for the circulation of the mythic text. Finally, we offer the idea that the efficacy of the archetype in the filmic text lays down more on the mythical paradigms than on the scientific ones.