Movie Review: ‘Mother!’

September 24, 2017 at 5:12 pm | Posted in Movies, Reviews | Leave a comment

Mother! may very well be one of the strangest movies I’ve ever seen. It’s also a fine example of how a movie trailer can leave an audience completed unprepared for the film they are about to experience. This is not a horror movie. It is not a movie about an evil cult. Instead, it’s a is story used as a representative of the events of the bible. A story within a story, and quite possibly stories hidden within those. It’s a complex movie filled with strangeness and probably not for everyone. However, I kind of liked it.

On the surface, this film starts out as a story of a poet struggling to write again and his wife rebuilding their house. They are visited by a stranger, Ed Harris, who mistook their house for a bed and breakfast. The poet offers to let him stay the night, even though his wife is against it. Eventually the stranger’s wife shows up, then their two kids. Time passes and the poet begins to write again. His new poem is a smashing success which earns him tons of publicity with fans showing up to the house to see him. Then things get chaotic and go off the rails crazy.

If you went to see the movie and failed to see the biblical connections, you would be utterly confused. None of the characters have names, and the surface story becomes so bizarre that it wouldn’t make any sense. But once you make the connection, everything starts to fall into place. All of the characters are representatives of characters in the bible. The events the take place in the movie, mimic certain key events from the bible. There’s Adam and Eve, Cain and Able, the flood, Jesus, and even Armageddon. One story bleeds into another to create a very surreal experience that isn’t quite one or the other, but a blend of both.

Once it clicked and I figured out what was happening in the movie, it became a religious jigsaw puzzle of trying to figure out what elements in the movie were representations of what elements in the bible. Not everything is clear cut, which kind of warrants a second viewing just to try and decipher the movie to a greater degree. Nonetheless, the complexity of the layering of stories is very intriguing as its not just a retelling of the bible. The surface story is a bit a parable that tries to reveal truths or at least ideas about the stories in the bible. In fact at the end there is a particular line that really resonated with me as it made clear what the very purpose of the film might be. To put it simply, Aronofsky’s attempts to illuminate the meaning of life. Why are we here and if everyone was created by a god, what was the purpose? What was his purpose?

So in the end, Mother! does something extremely strange but, in turn, equally thought provoking. This is a movie that begs to be discussed and debated as there is so much you can dig into. I don’t recommend it for everyone, but if you don’t mind a bizarre film that’ll get your head spinning and leave you talking afterwards, this one is definitely worth checking out. Just make sure you go in prepared for a movie that’s really a representative for something else. I give it a four out of five metal bikinis.

Reviewed By: Skuldren for Roqoo Depot.