mother! – Movie Review

mother! is a 2017 drama/thriller film written and directed by Darren Aronofsky. The film stars Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, and Michelle Pfeiffer while the plot follows a young woman whose tranquil life with her husband at their country home is disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious couple.

So this is going to be a pretty short review since the only way to talk more about this film is to make this a spoiler review.. which I don’t want to do since a majority of my audience doesn’t like that. So to open, mother! is probably one of the stranger films I’ve gone out to see in 2017, if not the strangest. I went into the film knowing a single sentence of context, while also only seeing the first teaser trailer. Although audience members have been very hard on this film, mother! is a good time to be had if you have the mind to understand it.

So lets start off with the cast since it’s the main driving force of this film. Jennifer Lawrence.. well, you either like her or hate her, and as time goes on I’m starting to like her a lot less. That being said, Lawrence breaks the mold that people usually throw her into, and does an absolutely phenomenal job. I’ll go ahead and say it, but this is probably the best performance I’ve seen from a female actor this year. Oscar territory, no lie. Javier Bardem was also great in his role, and gave off such a likable and questionable presence throughout the film. I didn’t really care for Ed Harris’ character, but Michelle Pfeiffer was great,and really brought out emotion in the audience that really invoked me.

The characters we’re decently fleshed out as well as the story, but even if they weren’t I would still be okay with it because of what this film represents. In case you all haven’t heard by now, mother! is a very metaphorical film. Some early reviewers have dubbed it as an “Allegorical thriller,” which is a pretty accurate representation of the film. It has a very deep meaning that is woven throughout the film’s narrative, and if you don’t have any idea of what the film is relating to then the movie is going to either bore you or creep you out. I went in knowing a single part of the film’s metaphor, but even with such little knowledge I had a fairly easy time putting the pieces together. A lot of people went into this film thinking that it was a horror film, but as you all could tell by the way I classified this film’s genre, it is by no means a horror film. Sure, there are some horror-like scenes, but there is nothing out to haunt anyone in this movie.

With all that being said, mother! didn’t ace a lot of things either. The film’s marketing brought in a bunch of mindless horror film fanatics that didn’t understand Aronofsky’s vision, and just like It Comes At Night, it left people angered rather than entertained. mother! also featured some really annoying camera angles with constant closeups on Lawrence’s face, and got to the point where I felt extremely annoyed by this type of shot. There were also some instances where I found the sound design to be way too unrealistic, which kind of broke the immersion that I had going on with the film.

Overall, mother! was an interesting film which will be either loved or hated by members of the audience. The ones that love it will understand the message that Aronofsky was trying to paint, while the ones that hate it will be mindless fools who went in with the intention of it being another stupid horror film. Luckily I had a small bit of knowledge going into the film so I was able to understand the picture pretty well. While others might not have the same luck, it’s really not hard to catch on by the third act. In the end mother! was a truly unique film that featured a beautiful hidden message, and won itself a “Good” on theVade Review Bar. Aronofsky’s allegorical film is another one of those movies that will leave the intelligent dumbfounded, and the dumb invoked with more questions than answers.