mother! : The Psychological Torture of a Thriller

“I apologize,” Aronofsky told the audience at the Toronto International Film Festival before the screening of the new film, “for what I’m about to do to you.” A frustrating and tense bid to reach understanding and ‘peace’ in Darren Aronofsky’s plot-thick but atmospheric psychological horror movie.

After Aronofsky’s Black Swan raising his popularity amongst many psychological horror/thriller fans, and his first work Noah in 2014, three and a half years later his latest presents audiences not with a response to his earlier work, but with a catharsis of everything that he has worked for, warts and all.

This is a movie where the less you know going in, the better. But that doesn’t mean by the end of the movie everything will make sense right away. In mother!, the ordinary deftly morphs into an exhausting, breathless fever dream wherein everyday life is a panic attack with no end in sight in what is Arofonsky’s most audacious work in over a decade.

The movie concerns an unnamed married couple (Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem) who are in the process of renovating his old house in which he lost virtually everything in a fire. He’s a writer and she’s relegated to acting as a housewife, and he’s a struggling to get more ideas while she rebuilds the house wall-to-wall. An unknown man (Ed Harris) shows up, and while the husband is proud to invite him into their shared life, the wife is apprehensive. Soon after, a woman (Michelle Pfieffer) comes, who turns out to be the man’s wife. That’s all that needs to be known story-wise; anything else would risk revealing the narrative.

The plot unravels like a ball of barbed wire, running over audiences and their expectations and cutting them all up in the process. The entire movie has religious undertones and symbolism throughout in the ‘devil’s advocate style’ of perspective towards religion. Working from the idea of ‘Mother Nature’ and God himself, to the followers and the destruction. Aronofsky’s fascination with the darkness that is implicit within humanity remains as sharp as ever, like a silenced gun hidden under the vest of a finely quaffed sharp-shooter.

Shot on 16mm by Matthew Libatique, who has shot all of Aronofsky’s features to date, the film maintains a disarming warmness throughout, one in which the shadows are oddly soft and the light creates a form of security that is just waiting to be perverted. The way the cinematography is used to cause stress and anxiety in the audience works in every single way. There is no time to take a breath and relax for as long as this movie is playing.

mother! is a movie that, despite all of its psychological chaos, is why movies are seen to be a form of therapy. When the surroundings feel unappreciative and fast-moving, it’s easy to fall into an abyss in which life moves exponentially faster. Aronofsky gleefully drags his audience through a bevy of carnage but maintains just the pace to gaslight viewers into understanding the film’s Polanskian brand of logic.

After coming out of the cinema, I wanted Aronofsky’s apology face-to-face, and to scream into the sky.