Ironically enough, Mother! is the most balls-out, aggressively weird movie of the year, maybe the decade, and it's a real motherfucker of a trip. Where to start? Fair warning: spoilers abound, because otherwise it's impossible to talk about the movie.
I guess to start: The movie is palpably pretentious. It's the sort of trash-meets-Art experiment that sometimes works, but in the hands of Darren Aronofsky it becomes that rare High Art that stabs you right where it counts. The characters have no names, referred to even in the credits as Mother (Jennifer Lawrence in the best role she's had in years), Him (her husband, played by Javier Bardem), Man (Ed Harris), and Woman (a delicious Michelle Pfeiffer). These characters are played as real, immediate, and consequential, but by the time the movie is over you realize they've played allegory with such nuanced, unrecognizable skill that you feel you've been had. Which is, of course, what Aronofsky intended. The master crafter of Black Swan hasn't used up all his tricks yet, thank heaven.
The film opens with a close up of a woman burning amidst a blazing inferno, her eyes glassy and calm as her skin bubbles and scorches. We jump immediately into a surreal sequence where Him places a crystal on a pedestal, and the burned and broken house around him transforms into a gorgeously renovated mansion. A pile of ashes on the bed form into the shape of a woman, and Jennifer Lawrence awakens, turns to look for her absent husband, and calls out, "Baby?" Already there's so much to unpack, and the movie hasn't even rolled on for five minutes. But we'll get to that presently.
The first half of the film works much as we expect from the trailers, a sort of psychosexual domestic thriller that combines imagery and themes from Rosemary's Baby, The Strangers, and Eyes Wide Open. There are many, many more obvious and subtle references, but that would require encyclopedic skill and time to relate; just know that Aronofsky's blatant grabs for other Art are only the tip of his ballsy project. Most simply: Mother is the renovator of this gorgeous mansion in an Edenic field, seemingly isolated in the country, and the perfectly wifely partner to Him, a famed poet suffering writer's block. She not only literally rebuilds his wasted ancestral home all alone, but she manages to clean after him, cook extravagant meals, and still look super fine doing it all.
But all is not well in cishetero-patriarchal paradise. Mother is cracking on the inside. She has spells of tinnitus, a debilitating ringing that makes her dizzy and weak until she pours a sickly yellow drug into a glass of water and downs it. She also has this tendency to stare into the walls of her home to perceive a beating heart there. These images seem to discomfort her, along with the bizarre and creepy comings and goings of Him, and we eventually learn that she wants a child -- or maybe her husband does? It's left quite ambiguous -- and that the couple doesn't make love often, if ever.
One night, a visitor arrives at their lonely estate, a visitor (Ed Harris) it seems her husband was expecting. He assumes his place in the house through shady storytelling and lies with great big holes. But Mother's protestations are put to rest by her husband, who demands her hospitality and compliance while doing nothing to help himself. She makes the bed. She cooks the food and boils the tea. She cleans up after him. And yet her express wish for him not to smoke is ignored. Her husband is enthralled with this man, who strokes his ego and puts stars in his eyes. Apparently this Man is a fan of the poet's work, and he lusts after the poet's crystal.
Soon enough, the Man's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up too, though he had neglected to mention her existence. Their obviously erotic relationship unnerves Mother but entrances Him, and the intrusive couple overstay their welcome in every possible way. They are terrible houseguests and awful people, and soon they invite their spiteful, bickering sons as well (Domhnall and Brian Gleeson), one of which slays the other. Soon more people arrive for the funeral, and it's right about this time I gathered what Aronofsky was doing. The movie is a psychological thriller, yes, but it's also a fiercely original vision of religious allegory. Man and Woman, the Man with a flesh wound where his rib should be, they break the crystal as a form of original sin, one son murders the other. Cut and dry, right?
WRONG.
The second half of the film gets really messed up. It's some aggressively weird filmmaking, but it's also some of the best filmmaking this year. After an angry, passionate sex scene, Mother finally becomes pregnant, but she still sees the slowly dying heart in the walls of the house, and the blood spot rotting away the floorboards beneath the murder scene keeps returning, much like in Poe's "Tell-Tale Heart." Also much like that story, we begin to fear for Mother's sanity, but we quickly lose that fear in favor of our own. When strange people keep invading the house and destroying it, we realize Mother may not be losing her mind, but we're losing ours. The frenzied, infuriating, abstract absurdity of the horrors are like a knife to the heart, and I had to occasionally close my eyes to wonder if I was having a stroke.
I didn't think things could get weirder, but Aronofsky seems pointedly aware that things can always get more insane. A quiet dinner gone wrong turns into a party, a rave, a riot, a war zone. But even saying that lessens what the film is doing. There's a concentration camp, a cult, cannibals, and before all is said and done Kristen Wiig shows up to sacrifice a baby. The previously timeless setting (Woman has a cell phone, but Him writes using a quill and inkwell) is taken to drastic extremes, and we lose all sense of place and logic. It's hardcore crazy-porn (if that's a thing?), and that's inflicted both on us and on Mother. It doesn't help that the film's utter lack of musical score heightens the drama, and carefully calculated, disturbingly edited sound effects raise the stakes to skin-crawling extremes.
Aronofsky keeps such a tight focus on Jennifer Lawrence throughout the film that it's sometimes hard to see the religious allegory. We get deeply invested in her brave performance, and the film encourages out sympathy with her character. In fact, Aronofsky seems determined to protect her point of view, which messes of course with our traditional understanding of the Judeo-Christian (or, actually, monotheistic) narrative. The director and cinematographer (Matthew Libatique), however, work even harder than that: their handheld camera is also active in the film, swirling and diving in, sometimes embracing Mother in its confidential gaze, sometimes prowling around her like a hungry wolf. Lawrence is never less than bare to our vision, but her strength and conviction is such that the wolf (us) can never take her down. In fact, during the crazed, extended climax of the apocalypse (I use the word because what else is the climax? Mother herself jokingly calls it that), the camera seems almost to suffer in its constant circling orbit around her character, as if she were a gravity well or black hole from which it (we) cannot escape. When, at her utmost, she screams for the death of her child and the ground shatters, we finally escape her orbit, briefly, to get an overhead view.
More than a psychological-supernatural thriller, though, and far more than a horrific religious allegory, Mother! is even still working harder to fight conventions. I think its ultimate goal is to depict the domestic horrors of a trophy wife to a Great Man, and the history of that in the world. Further, the film depicts this from said trophy wife's perspective, and forces us to live it with her. She's younger, more beautiful, but infinitely taken for granted. She's less confident, less praised, and less loved. Her final moments -- escaping the mob to the tankers in the basement, where she ignites the oil and destroys the world -- are a scream into the abyss, a cry of rage and pain and sorrow not unlike King Lear or Job, something I think Darren Aronofsky has tried to do with the film.
After the apocalypse, an unharmed Him carries her and she asks him, "Who are you?" "I am I," he responds cryptically, suggesting that he is God. But that phrasing also indicates that the film is suddenly switching its focus. It suddenly becomes about him. He finally becomes the subject of the film, and she becomes its literal object, something the film has played with ambivalently until that point. He kills her (mercifully? Who knows) by removing her heart, the ashes of which crystallize into -- you guessed it -- another beautiful gem he places on his shelf, which immediately restores the house.
Even if you read this review -- even if your skills at predicting a movie's plot twists are that good -- you will not, at all, in any capacity be ready for the way in which Aronofsky takes you through the picture. I guessed the religious allegory fairly early, and the nature of the poet's crystal. But there is nothing that could have prepared me for the sheer insanity and aggressive horror that got me to the end. You can talk about this movie for forever, in the right crowd. It's as though Aronofsky is taking everything that's ever been in his mind, splashing around in it, and throwing it at you point-blank. This is the rare movie that is totally uncategorizable because it is a consummate work of high art, containing so much trash and pulp that you feel icky for the entire two hours it violates your eyeballs.
It's magnificent. Easily my unexpected favorite this year and this decade.
IMDb: Mother!
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