by Chris Feil
Has the world already forgotten about mother!? It may not have ever been a film built to be a formidable Oscar contender, but Darren Aronofsky’s film is one to hang the year on nonetheless. Now is time for a healthy reassessment, as it arrives on streaming today!
Or maybe it might be a first watch for some, after that all-too-brief run in theatres. The film was killed by a flurry of hot takes, sink bracing jokes (guilty), dissections of its marketing, and conversations on the value of Cinemascore. But now that the dust and clickbait have settled, the film still remains one of the most audacious and purely entertaining films of the year. And also one of the very best that we should keep talking about...
Did the film burn off all of its steam in its mystery-box promotion and post-release hyper-eagerness to Explain Itself? Many of those who tired quickly of the film’s discussion will tell you a virulent yes, and maybe that has little to do with the film itself. It’s a strange film to claim it was treated cruelly considering its own violence, but it is certainly fair enough to say that it begs to be reassessed. As hulking as the film is perhaps we should have treated it more delicately, like Javier Bardem’s glinting, mantleplace crystal. Or, well, that unbraced sink.
Though mother! is as imposing as its brazen house guests, first suggestive and winkingly provocative before it becomes a Hieronymous Bosch-like display of human indiscretion. Hanging on Jennifer Lawrence’s every move, it’s difficult to remain passive to the film when it puts us so viscerally in her perspective. We feel accosted because the film is so effective at transplanting us into her experience.
But its assault on the senses isn’t without intent and the rueful abandon Aronofsky has for his metaphor has its own kind of poetry. He staged the film with fluid precision, lending various rooms of the house with their own significance (notice how some of the nastiest bits occur in the nursery, where Adam and Eve had once been seen getting frisky). The film works because it is such a roller coaster and a florid one, as wickedly entertaining as it is a mental workout. It’s exhausting, but potent.
I’m also not so sold that we’ve fully examined the full texture of mother!‘s allegory with how it reveals other things festering in our culture. Sure, by now we all get that mother!’s angle is Old Testament punishment in the context of climate concerns, but you don’t have to scratch the film to gloss more than the Biblical. How women are told to behave and to what purpose, particularly as embodied by Michelle Pfeiffer’s boozy Eve. The implications of an increasingly validated fear of the outsider, the dangers of willful myopia. The ways in which we (singular and global) lose our identity to service another’s.
It’s a film the most wicked of us can greet with alacrity. As our mounting cultural depression creeps towards nihilism from the slow drip of the ongoing news cycle’s monsoon, there is something oddly comforting in mother!’s righteous embrace. It’s angry cinema of the boldest order, almost a relief that something so damning can come when it's needed most.
Or if that’s not your brand of comforting, just know you will have a lot of fun both during the film’s cataclysm and discussing it later. No matter the bombast or the sheer intensity, mother! is a rich experience that only tightens its grip over multiple viewings. In a year of films that speak to the hell of living today, from Get Out to The Post to several others, it’s one that shouldn’t be forgotten in the narrative. One imagines time will actually be kind to the film, but audiences should wait around for the tide to turn. It demands to be seen (or reseen) now and then do it all over again. Baby.
mother! is available now on iTunes and Amazon Instant.