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Picture
A serious strain is put on a couple's marriage when the husband
​invites a number of strangers into their home against his wife's wishes.
HORROR

Mother! (2017)

Written and Directed by Darren Aronofsky

Starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris,
​Michelle Pfeiffer, Brian Gleeson, Domhnall Gleeson, Kristen Wiig

Connor Eyzaguirre
January 25, 2018
5/10
As soon as I finished watching this film, I knew I hated it. I should've seen it coming. After all, I hated Noah. But this film does something so unconventional that I couldn't believe it. It abandons story, characters, and any sort of sense in favor of a preachy art horror film that leaves the audience in the dark from beginning to end. The third act is brutal, disgusting, nonsensical, infuriating, and just plain dumb at times. It wasn't until I did some research while preparing for this review that I began to put Aronofsky's vision together. Mother! is an allegory for mankind's destruction of Mother Nature and God's creation of Adam and Eve. I thought back to every significant event in the movie, including the psychotic ending, and suddenly everything clicked. It made sense, and it actually came across as somewhat brilliant.

That being said, not every moviegoer is going to understand that. Mother! relies on its audience's prior knowledge of the bible in order to be understood. It's not a good filmmaking technique, which is why the film received a number of terrible reviews out of the gate. Now that I know what Aronofsky was trying to say, the film does seem better but not by much. It's a brilliant concept to try to convey, but the film is still boring, hard to follow, and pretentious. While Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem do their best to hold this sinking ship together, both of their characters end up coming across as selfish and annoying.

Mother! was billed as a Rosemary's Baby-esque religious horror film, and while there's a bit of that throughout, the end result is an exercise in blatant false advertising. It brought to mind another of 2017's horror disappointments, It Comes At Night, which attempted a similar biblical allegory premise and failed just as miserably. I can understand a filmmaker's impulse to want to be unique or create something that will make the audience think. But there are ways of doing that without making a film that alienates an audience and exists for pure shock value. There are moments in this film that are just uncomfortable to watch. Horror should scare, but it shouldn't make you feel sick to your stomach. I consider Mother! to be a colossal failure and a painfully misguided metaphor for creation. I can't imagine anybody found this film entertaining in the least.

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