A two-hour descent into madness
Mother! (R18, 121mins), Directed by Darren, Aronofsky ★★★★
This psychological thriller is certainly not for the faint-hearted. Bewildering, increasingly bizarre and at times brutal to watch, Mother! is confronting, confusing and confounds any attempt to categorise it.
But that’s also what makes it great. This is a movie that you’ll be unpacking, meditating on and desperate to discuss for days.
Everyone will have their own theories about what it’s really about, no doubt encompassing everything from religion to the environment to the end of civilisation.
To me, it isn’t so much a ‘‘modern day horror’’, as a horror about the times we live in. In short, you bring your own nightmares and fears to this twohour descent into madness.
When it first begins, we meet a couple living on a rural property. It’s his (Javier Bardem) ancestral home and he’s moved back in the hope that it will inspire him to write poetry again.
While he attempts to solve his writer’s block, his much younger wife (Jennifer Lawrence) sets about doing the place up, happy in her isolation and domesticity. But that’s shattered one night by the arrival of a stranger (Ed Harris), an orthopaedic surgeon who claims he thought their place was a bed and breakfast.
The poet does the seemingly honourable thing and invites him to stay the night, but instantly develops a rapport with the guest that troubles his wife.
Her concerns are further raised with the arrival of the surgeon’s wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), who begins asking all sorts of intrusive questions about their love life. However, that’s only the tip of the iceberg of troubles that await as her worst fears are realised.
Writer-director Aronofsky ( Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan) is known for his surreal, dark tales of obsessions and fears and Mother! certainly doesn’t disappoint on that front.
Using shots that seem almost invasive, rather than simply ‘‘close ups’’ and a soundscape that heightens the central house’s every creak and groan, he puts the audience on edge from the first few frames and refuses to release us from his grasp.
It helps immensely that he has such a terrific cast, with Bardem ( Skyfall) at his brooding best and Pfeiffer ( Dangerous Minds) and Harris ( Apollo 13) charismatically unsettling. But this is Lawrence’s film and she delivers in spades, enduring all kinds of indignities and providing the audience with a very human connection to what could have been a very alienating experience. Much has been made of the film’s similarities to Rosemary’s Baby and it’s true there are plenty of nods to that and other Polanski films.
In reality though Mother! has more in common with the works of Cronenberg and Lynch, with its body horrors, houses that drip blood and overall feelings of angst, as well as providing an interesting counterpoint to one of 2017’s other memorable films, A Ghost Story.
Both play with the concept of time and its cyclical nature, although Mother! is very much A Ghost Story‘ s dark malevolent cousin. Be afraid, be very afraid.