mother!

mother! (2017) begins like a film about a house and ends as something else entirely. It is Aronofsky's most divisive work. An unnamed woman lives in a country house with her unnamed husband. She is restoring the house alone. He is a poet and cannot write. One night there is a knock and a stranger comes in. Then his wife. Then their children. Then more. She keeps trying to say no and he keeps letting people in. This is not a realist narrative but an allegory. The house is the world, the man is the creator, the woman is nature, and the crowd is humanity. That reading is consistent with Aronofsky's own account. Because it is a deliberate allegory the characters' behaviour cannot be explained by everyday logic, and that is the same reason people love it and hate it. The formal choice is radical. The camera almost never leaves Jennifer Lawrence; the film is either on her face or over her shoulder. What she does not see, you do not see. There is no score. All the sound is the sound of the room, and that emptiness becomes unbearable in the last half hour. Audience reaction was extraordinarily hostile; it is among the very few films to receive the lowest possible grade in cinema exit polling. It runs 121 minutes. Good for: allegorical cinema, Aronofsky, and films worth arguing about. Less good for: the last half hour contains extremely severe material including violence toward an infant. Most viewers disliked this film and their reasons are valid.