Mattson Tomlin’s feature debut uses a robot apocalypse to frame something quieter and harder to escape: the approach of parenthood in a world that has stopped making plans.

Georgia and her boyfriend Sam are not ready to be parents. That’s where the film begins, on Christmas Eve, with a pregnancy test and a conversation that stays unfinished. Before they can have it, the androids — until that moment obedient, unremarkable — turn violent, and the country shifts into something no one had a protocol for.

Written and directed by Mattson Tomlin in his feature directorial debut, Mother/Android (2021) was produced by Miramax and shot across Massachusetts over autumn 2020. Tomlin, who has since written screenplays for larger projects, drew from his own adoption story in shaping the film — a choice that gives the survival premise a more specific emotional weight than the genre usually manages.

Chloë Grace Moretz plays Georgia with a focus that holds through scenes the screenplay doesn’t fully support. Algee Smith, as Sam, brings enough warmth and uncertainty to make the couple’s road believable even when the android uprising stays largely offscreen. The film is not especially interested in its machines; it’s interested in what Georgia is carrying, literally and otherwise.

Raúl Castillo takes on Arthur, a man they encounter in the no man’s land between their starting point and the fortified city they are trying to reach. His presence shifts the film’s tone in ways that are more effective than expected, and the final movement — set around the last stretch of the journey — has a bleakness that earns it. Cinematographer Patrick Scola shoots the Massachusetts woodland with consistent restraint, keeping the scale human.

Whether Mother/Android is a good film is less clear than whether it is an earnest one. The post-apocalyptic framework is familiar enough that every deviation from genre convention reads as a deliberate choice, and not all of those choices land. Still, Tomlin’s debut is too specific in its feeling to be dismissed entirely — it has the texture of something made with a reason behind it.

For audiences who find the premise of an AI uprising less interesting than the people caught inside it, the film delivers exactly what it sets out to: a survivalist drama in which the machines are scenery and the human cost is the subject.