Darren Aronofsky’s mother! bears little beyond its allegory

As his follow-up to Black Swan and Noah, Darren Aronofsky has unwelcomely invited the respective psychological horror and very literal biblical inspiration of those pictures into a single home with mother!, a film almost as unbearably pretentious as its title. It ostensibly serves as a satirical critique of Old Testament God—and perhaps, tone-deaf, of the male ego—by way of a ’70s Polanski thriller (one of its posters already made an on-the-nose comparison to Rosemary’s Baby). Instead, it comes across like an interminable live-theater installation project, forcing viewers to follow uncomfortably close to Jennifer Lawrence as she explores a soundtrack-free space that serves as a painfully obvious recontextualisation of a well-known work.

Lawrence stars in a purposely unnamed role that sticks her in a large, remote old home just as willfully never given any sense of place. Her husband, the noticeably older Javier Bardem (also unnamed, like everyone else in this thing), is a poet suffering from writer’s block for his, shall we say, CREATIONS. After one of his rare moments of inspiration, a knock at the couple’s door brings them Ed Harris’s vice-plagued, whiskey-drinking, chain-smoking doctor. He falls ill during the night and, after revealing a rib-level scar (ugh), his likewise hard-drinking wife (Michelle Pfeiffer, channeling Mary Steenburgen’s Last Man on Earth work) arrives at the home. Strangely, Bardem accepts both sinful humans with open arms—that is, until they enter his study and break the precious crystal our apparently Swarovski-loving poetry Creator has deemed off limits. Do you get where this is going yet? Hint: it’s the Bible.

Still, it’s not that the Bible is necessarily a poor blueprint for a film, but mother! is beholden to its own detriment. The movie’s entire raison d’être seems to be for nodding haughtily as one recognizes its biblical analogues. It would be a well-directed, wonderfully-acted little psychological thriller if it wouldn’t keep reaching into its all-too-literally-realized Hell of a modernized Sunday school lesson.

Yet as easy as it is to blame all our problems on God, much as we shout at the sky every cursed night, there’s more guiding mother! down the wrong path than His hand. Continuing a running theme with the Requiem for a Dream director’s work, Aronofsky’s film is flat-out punishing to watch. With strange repetition, the film devolves into an improv game of Party Quirks that’s harder to handle than even the worst episodes of Whose Line Is It Anyway?. The guests of humanity just keep coming, and Lawrence is left quite literally shouting herself hoarse as they tear apart her house of lazy metaphors. Like last month’s Good Time, it’s filmed almost entirely as a visual assault of close-ups and disquieting, often bloody images. But unlike that film, this isn’t very good.

Grade: C-

mother!
Director: Darren Aronofsky
Studio: Paramount Pictures
Runtime: 121 minutes
Rating: R
Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson, Kristen Wiig

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