"mother!" is a masterclass in bewilderment, a long, strange trip that leads you nowhere recognizable, allowing you only to grope around in the post-credits dark, trying to find some semblance of meaning.
The film gives the audience just enough to put together a story — a writer and his wife living in the country, an unexpected visitor, death descending — but never enough for the story to seem normal in any way. There is always a dissonance at work. Things simply happen and are not explained; scene drifts into scene with total chaos always lurking at the periphery.
Yet, this deep confusion is not a consequence of director Darren Aronofsky’s sloppy directorial hand. It’s a result of careful narrative framing.
Jennifer Lawrence plays the main character, unnamed. She lives in an idyllic country haven with her poet husband (Javier Bardem), who is currently suffering a troubling bout of writer’s block. They appear peaceful, although there’s certainly a distance to their relationship, particularly on the side of the husband. He is clearly harboring something, an inner pain, a secret that is never really divulged.
Part of what makes the movie so disorienting is the fact that Aronofsky allows the audience to see the perspective from solely Lawrence’s character, which is quite limited. When a husband and wife duo played by Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer begin staying at the house, Lawrence’s character is the last to know, and even then something is withheld.
Lawrence spends much of the movie stumbling around wholly confused as the events of the film grow ever stranger. The audience is never allowed to understand more than she does, which makes for an incredibly strange viewing experience.
At first, the film seems a simple domestic drama. Strangers drop in unexpectedly and cause a ruckus and someone is killed. The characters are left to pick up the pieces and heal.
Yet, Aronofsky is far from interested in anything simple or domestic. After Javier Bardem’s character writes a new poem, the movie goes off the proverbial rails. People fill up rooms seemingly out of nowhere. Soon, everything becomes inexplicable. Allegorical hints are seen as fans of Bardem’s character’s work appear like religious fanatics, getting blessed with smears of ink on their foreheads like ash on Ash Wednesday. However, the main theme or purpose of the film is never made wholly clear.
Aronofsky is undoubtedly at work with something devious here, but as the audience’s perspective is confined to that of Lawrence’s character, everything still seems frighteningly obscure.
