For me a film directed by Darren Aronofsky is very much event cinema and much of my admiration for him is the way he divides critics. He is a director with unlimited talent and absolutely no shame and for that alone he deserves much credit . On the surface MOTHER! seems to be a mystery drama involving a home invasion of sorts. However the way both the critics and the mainstream audience have reacted to its release gives a clue that you're not going to be seeing a mainstream thriller. We are after all watching a film by Aronofsky
One vocal criticism is that MOTHER! drowns in its own obsession with metaphor and allegory. Again this shouldn't be taken as a negative point. For much of the early part of the film we have something not too far removed from other home invasion movies where a couple take in a stranger and the stranger isn't who they seem. The plot turns start coming very thick and fast and before you know it the film has mutated in to something else very quickly
There's a downside to all this and that is that it stops being in anyway realistic . Okay you can excuse Javier Bardam's "Him" naive stupidity in order to set up the story but there has to be a limit and Aronofsky doesn't do limits so you have been warned
One gets the feeling that it's an extension of the director's previous film NOAH where these nasty human beings are destroying mother Earth but equally you can jump to the conclusion that it's a metaphor for America under the Trump presidency. Of course the production dates make this very unlikely but the constant conflict between Mother and Him as to letting strangers in to the house does strike a cord and perhaps in the future this film will be remembered as a social comment on America in the early 21st Century ? It's certainly a memorable film regardless of your politics and it's a movie that will take you a long time to work out if it's memorable in a good or bad way
One vocal criticism is that MOTHER! drowns in its own obsession with metaphor and allegory. Again this shouldn't be taken as a negative point. For much of the early part of the film we have something not too far removed from other home invasion movies where a couple take in a stranger and the stranger isn't who they seem. The plot turns start coming very thick and fast and before you know it the film has mutated in to something else very quickly
There's a downside to all this and that is that it stops being in anyway realistic . Okay you can excuse Javier Bardam's "Him" naive stupidity in order to set up the story but there has to be a limit and Aronofsky doesn't do limits so you have been warned
One gets the feeling that it's an extension of the director's previous film NOAH where these nasty human beings are destroying mother Earth but equally you can jump to the conclusion that it's a metaphor for America under the Trump presidency. Of course the production dates make this very unlikely but the constant conflict between Mother and Him as to letting strangers in to the house does strike a cord and perhaps in the future this film will be remembered as a social comment on America in the early 21st Century ? It's certainly a memorable film regardless of your politics and it's a movie that will take you a long time to work out if it's memorable in a good or bad way