Director calls horror story ‘mother!’ a roller-coaster ride

VENICE, Italy Director Darren Aronofsky says his film “mother!” — a delirious nightmare starring Jennifer Lawrence — is a “roller-coaster ride.”

Fittingly, it thrilled some viewers at the Venice Film Festival, and left others a bit queasy.

A horror story that travels from menace to mind-bending mayhem, the movie was greeted with a mix of applause and boos from journalists Tuesday at the Italy festival, where it’s one of 21 movies competing for the Golden Lion prize.

Lawrence and Javier Bardem play a couple — identified only as Mother and Him — living in that horror-flick staple, an isolated old house. He’s a poet with writer’s block, while she devotes herself to restoring the house after a devastating fire.

Mysterious houseguests, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, trigger unsettling events that get progressively weirder. Imagine a cross between “Rosemary’s Baby” and the teeming hell-scapes of medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch.

Aronofsky, who won the Golden Lion in 2008 for “The Wrestler,” acknowledged the movie was “a very, very strong cocktail.”

“Of course there are going to be people who are not going to want that type of an experience. And that’s fine,” he told reporters.

“I’ve been making it clear that this is a roller-coaster ride: Only come on it if you are really prepared to do the loopthe-loop a few times.”

Some critics were impressed by what a review in the Hollywood Reporter called the “madhouse bacchanal” of the film's final stretch. Others wondered what it all meant. Variety found it impressive but empty, a “baroque nightmare that's about nothing but itself.”

Aronofsky said the point of the film “is that it’s a mystery.”

“It’s constantly surprising the audience,” he said. “You don’t know where it's going to go. And we didn’t want to make the audience ever feel safe, because Jennifer’s character in the movie never feels safe.”

It's easy to see an environmental allegory in the film, about a house that is invaded, besieged, flooded and set on fire.

Aronofsky said the movie is his “howl to the moon,” provoked by anguish at the state of society and particularly the environment.

He said that while most of his films take years, he wrote the first draft of the script in just five days.