When Mother/Android opens, the androids are the least interesting thing in the room. Georgia and her boyfriend Sam have just taken a pregnancy test on Christmas Eve, and the conversation about what comes next has barely started when the machines — until that moment quietly domestic — turn violent and the world outside stops working. Mattson Tomlin’s debut feature is interested in that unfinished conversation more than in what triggered it.

Set in the months after a sudden android uprising, the film follows Georgia and Sam as they attempt a survivalist crossing through Massachusetts woodland toward a fortified coastal city. The journey is dangerous but deliberately low-key: the androids are offscreen more often than not, and the film’s dramatic weight comes from what Georgia carries — both the pregnancy and the compound of feelings around it. There are border checkpoints, strangers, and a crossing that costs something, but none of it is really the point.

Written and directed by Mattson Tomlin in his feature directorial debut, Mother/Android (2021) was produced by Miramax and shot across Massachusetts between September and November 2020 — in the Lynn Woods Reservation for the android-controlled zones and in downtown Boston for the human colony. Tomlin, who drew the emotional core from his own experience of adoption, has described the film as a kind of love letter to his biological parents. That origin gives the survival premise a more specific emotional register than the genre usually manages.

Chloë Grace Moretz plays Georgia with a controlled, inward intensity that holds across scenes the screenplay doesn’t always support. Algee Smith, as Sam, brings warmth and uncertainty to a character who is easier to understand than to define — and the dynamic between them feels genuinely textured even when the couple’s decisions resist easy explanation. The film relies heavily on their chemistry to carry stretches where the plotting is thin.

Raúl Castillo appears in the film’s middle section as Arthur, a figure encountered in the no man’s land between zones. His scenes shift the register in ways that are more effective than expected, and the film’s final stretch — stripped down to almost nothing — earns its quiet bleakness. Cinematographer Patrick Scola keeps the scale human throughout, shooting the Massachusetts woodland with consistent restraint.

Mother/Android is not a tidy film. The android premise raises genre expectations the story isn’t trying to meet, and some of the narrative connective tissue is thin enough to notice. What it offers, more reliably, is earnestness: made with a specific feeling behind it and a relatively clear-eyed sense of what it’s actually about. For audiences who find the AI-uprising premise less interesting than the people navigating it, that turns out to be enough.