Lawrence challenged by Aronofsky roller-coaster of terror
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.
The movie was greeted with a mix of applause and boos from journalists Tuesday at the Italian festival, where it’s competing for the Golden Lion.
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 house guests, played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer, trigger unsettling events that get progressively weirder. Imagine a cross between Rosemary’s Baby and the teeming hellscapes of medieval artist Hieronymus Bosch.
Aronofsky 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.
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 (Lawrence’s) character in the movie never feels safe.”
The characters are as much archetypes as people — a challenge for the cast. Lawrence, who has portrayed a string of strong women, here plays a meek wife, destined to suffer.
“It was a completely different character from anything I’ve ever done before, but it was also a different side of myself that I wasn’t in touch with and I didn’t really know, yet,” said Lawrence. “It was difficult. It was the most I’ve ever had to pull out of myself.”