Mother!

An ambitious, audacious failure, Mother! follows a nameless couple (Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem) as their isolated existence is slowly-but-surely upended by a variety of sinister outside forces. Filmmaker Darren Aronofsky makes his overtly (and aggressively) avant-garde sensibilities apparent right from its opening few minutes, as Mother! kicks off with a visually-impressively yet wholly baffling shot that’s ultimately indicative of the ensuingly head-scratching vibe – although, to be fair, the movie does, for much of its first hour, boast the feel of a low-key and somewhat mundane domestic drama. This is especially apparent in the early emphasis on Lawrence and Bardem’s annoying, oddly insistent houseguests (Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris), and yet Aronofsky’s inability (or refusal, more likely) to wholeheartedly flesh-out the characters makes it exceedingly difficult to actually care about any of this. There does, of course, reach a point at which Mother! becomes completely and entirely unmoored from any sense of reality, and while the degree to which Aronofsky commits to the nonsensical, nightmarish atmosphere is impressive, the progressively meandering narrative paves the way for a second half that’s almost entirely devoid of intelligible, interesting sequences (ie one can’t help but wish that Aronofsky would just get on with it already). The viewer’s hope that everything will come together and make sense in the end is obliterated by a full-circle conclusion that doesn’t offer any answers, and it is, in the end, impossible to label Mother! as anything more than a hopelessly self-indulgent vanity project that offers little in the way of entertainment (or coherence).

** out of ****