Is Darren Aronofsky's Film 'mother!' Any Good? Here's What The Reviews Say
The promotional build-up for Darren Aronofsky's "mother!" has made it look strangely like a conventional psychological horror film, which would be an odd regression for the man behind "Requiem for a Dream," "Noah" and "Black Swan." By all accounts the film, which opens Friday September 15th, is way weirder and more chaotic than the trailer suggests. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem star in this fever dream that's sure to alienate many — will it be up your alley? Here's what the reviews are saying (some spoilers ahead):
'mother!' Starts With Some Unwelcome House Guests
The setup is straightforward: Jennifer Lawrence plays a young woman married to a celebrated poet, who is played by Javier Bardem. He has a bad case of
writer's block, she's fixing up their remote house in the country, and things seem fine until Ed Harris shows up at the door, followed by Michelle Pfeiffer, followed by lots of other people.
[TheWrap]
The couple are intrusive, inserting themselves into the placid life of the poet and his wife, asking invasive questions and making themselves entirely too much at home. Eventually their two grown and feuding sons (real-life brothers Brian and Domhnall Gleeson) show up and start fighting in the house.
[Vox]
mother! plays like a dream. Sometimes, it's a dream of paradise, of lush, wide-open spaces and warming cups of tea. At other times, it's a suffocating nightmare of hell – specifically, the hell that is other people, greedy and lustful and selfish and rude. (One gets the feeling that Aronofsky really, really hates having people over.)
[Mashable]
Then The Movie Gets Totally, Unapologetically Bonkers
mother! opens Friday, and normally I wonder why a film festival would bother to show a movie that's coming out in a week. In this case I understand: Aronofsky's cosmic thriller outshines nearly everything here, although it does so in a way that will probably keep it from winning major awards. It's just too crazy. And I should warn you that it's kind of movie that can drive you crazy, too, if you're not in the right mood. Everyone here in Toronto loves or hates it and leaves the theater talking about it.
[Vogue]
Also, there's one scene in mother! that I won't at all spoil, but I kind of wish I could just spend the whole day at a local Cineplex and just keep watching unsuspecting patrons react to it. It's pretty unlike anything I've ever scene before and is going to get quite the reaction.
[UPROXX]
It's a very bad dream of very bad things: influenced perhaps by Polanski's Rosemary's Baby or Buñuel's The Exterminating Angel and I suspect that Aronofsky has fallen under the spell of the dark master of offensive mischief himself, Lars Von Trier and his horror film Antichrist. But it is as deadpan comedy that this film can be understood: a macabre spectacle of revulsion, a veritable agape of chaos. The opening act gives us a view of a human heart being flushed down the lavatory – as good an image as any for the film's mysterious, hallucinatory callousness.
Really, Don't Anticipate Leaving The Theater With A Solid Idea Of What The Hell Just Happened
I'm not much for allegory, but when the allegory comes in a cinematic package as vibrant, momentum-charged, virtuosic, and just-plain-messed-up as Darren Aronofsky's "mother!" does, I can roll with it, as they say. More than roll with it, actually. I was exhilarated and enthralled by each of the movie's 120 minutes despite the fact that ultimately I felt only a limited affinity with what it was communicating.
Those who insist on every film serving up a single and unequivocal interpretation may be driven a little mad, or perhaps they'll just dig in and insist that only their own interpretation is correct.
[Mashable]
This quasi-hallucinatory, disco inferno-ish climax is multilayered and ambiguous enough to accommodate multiple interpretations; it's a mother's worst nightmare, a vision of the contemporary world coming apart while the oblivious masses treat it as the ultimate party, a view of primitive hedonism trumping educated civilization, the destructive mob prevailing over the constructive individual, all perhaps an intuitive sign of the times as envisioned by Aronofsky.
But if he's directing with abandon, Aronofsky is also entirely in control. Nothing happens in Mother! he doesn't intend. The apocalypse works just as expected. Bits of his earlier creations are present everywhere, but this seems like it could be in its perfected state. The world he's created feels practiced and familiar and yet entirely new.
[Vox]
Jennifer Lawrence Is A Transfixing Lead Here
The main reason to keep watching is Lawrence, receptive and radiant. If you were to tote up the lines of dialogue she gets, you wouldn't find many, and most are of the "What are you doing?" and "Get out of here!" variety. But her face, almost celestial in its insistent hope, gets the job done.
[TIME]
Cinematographer Matthew Libatique's handheld camera bops and swerves alongside the lead, often holding her in tight super-16 close-ups (fans of the both dynamic actress and celluloid grain are about to have a field day) that capture her growing horror as her life spirals out of control.
Lawrence carries the movie. Aronofsky keeps his camera close into her face almost all of the time: her creamy, waxy youthfulness and beauty fill the screen and immediately transmit the displeasure and disquiet that she must keep under control. Bardem's sensual slab of a face is closely monitored too: responding to her furious complaints with a complacent, seraphic smile, treating her like an uncomprehending child or a bovine icon, orbiting him as the centre of a glorious new belief system which will be in place as his published works inspire more and more people.
You'll Probably Pick Up On The Streak Of Directorial Egoism In The Film
On more than one occasion in his work, Francois Truffaut posed the question, "Are films more important than life?" He never really answered it, but Aronofsky looks to be made of sterner, grimmer stuff, embedding his intellectual inquiries in dramatic contexts that lend themselves to sensationalism shot through with abundant creative displays of ego.
The movie works on its own benighted terms: Like Black Swan, it's a tour de force. I respected Black Swan, though, because it made the case — however ludicrous and questionable — that the greatest performing comes at a personal cost. Mother!, on the other hand, is grandiose and self-aggrandizing.
[Vulture]
There's lashing hostility in its excesses, the fevered insecurity of an artist who fears the attention of his public as much as he does their abandonment, and an acrid streak of romantic regret that might, if you squint just right, make this The Fountain's most unlikely bookend. That film was his valentine to then-partner Rachel Weisz. This one? I wouldn't dare speculate, but my lurid side would give a barrowful of pennies for Weisz's thoughts.
All That Said, Some People Will Be Turned Off By Aronofsky's Artsiness (Or Is It Lack Thereof?)
To the two-thirds mark, Mother! feels like a theater piece tricked out with Gothic horror effects — a Pinter parlor-squirm number or Albee's A Delicate Balance plus bumps and spooky floorboard creaks. The Polanski Rosemary's Baby influence is in there, too, obviously, with its diabolical menagerie focused on a woman's swelling uterus. But most of the dialogue and effects are clunky, repetitive, second-rate. A minute or so of David Lynch's latest Twin Peaks series has more irrational menace. For all its feverish activity, Mother! feels static.
[Vulture]
Aronofsky, to his credit, doesn't take delight in torturing his lead character. His sympathy is with her every minute, and ours is too. But even though the movie's effects are elaborate and expensive-looking—the house itself becomes a character, a prison folding in itself, or a mansion exploding like a grim flower—the picture leaves us with nothing, or very little, to hang onto. It tries so desperately to be crazy and disturbing that all we can see is the effort made and the money spent.
[TIME]
You might say that it's Aronofsky's (confessional?) vision of what it's like being married to a famous egocentric artist. But you could also say that "mother!" is so intent on putting an undeserving woman through the terrors of the damned that there's a residue of misogyny to its design.
[Variety]
TL;DR
Mother! is not a well-behaved movie. It does not obey the loosest expectations, even for an art-genre whatchamacallit by which we eagerly anticipate being freaked out. In terms of cinematic structure and discipline, it makes Black Swan look like an episode of Murder, She Wrote.
Watch The Trailer
