‘mother!’: Darren Aronofsky’s Scorchingly Brilliant Thriller Is Visceral, Go-For-Broke Madness [Venice Review]

In through the nose, out slowly through the mouth…If you are not familiar with the Lamaze breathing technique for women in labor, acquaint yourself with it before donning your hazmat suit and embarking on Darren Aronofsky’s “mother!” which uncoils from a murderously tense, tricky and claustrophobic first hour into some of the most sustained escalating insanity (and scorchingly brilliant filmmaking) ever to burn down a cinema screen. An incendiary religious allegory, a haunted-house horror, a psychological head trip so extreme it should carry a health warning and an apologia for crimes of the creative ego past and not yet committed, it’s not just Aronofsky’s most bombastic, ludicrous and fabulous film, spiked with a kind of reckless, go-for-broke, leave-it-all-up-there-on-the-screen abandon, it is simply one of the most films ever. Seldom has a title ever earned its exclamation point in more emphatic fashion. In fact it deserves a few more, so here they are: !!!!!!!!!

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The very first image, even before the title flashes up in its scratchy calligraphic font, is a close-up of a woman’s face as she burns alive — skin bubbling and peeling, eyes open and glassily, eerily calm. (There will be quite a bit of looping and pattern repetition going on throughout, but this first shot might as well be a kind of future-mirror for how your own face is going to feel in about two hours — forget popcorn, bring aloe vera). From there we go straight into a dreamily surreal sequence as Javier Bardem places a big crystal on a stand on a warped and charred dresser, and Matthew Libatique‘s sinous camera trails through a grand isolated house as it un-burns itself down from the inside, the ceilings un-scorching, the walls un-buckling, before coming to rest on Jennifer Lawrence waking up, feeling the emptiness of the bed beside her. “Baby?” she calls out.

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The house is the one she and her husband (Bardem) share (the characters remain nameless throughout, only referred to as “mother” and “him” in the press notes). But it’s really his home, one that his young wife has painstakingly devoted herself to restoring after a fire destroyed it. He is a successful poet, trapped in a creative funk until the arrival one evening of a man (Ed Harris) who turns out to be a fan, and whom, despite his wife’s feeble protestations, the poet invites to stay. He’s soon joined by his wife (a deliciously malevolent and predatory Michelle Pfeiffer) and later his sons show up, played by real-life brothers Domhnall and Brian Gleeson. It’s the most extreme version of the horror we’ve all felt at having to entertain unannounced, uninvited and unwelcome guests, but Lawrence’s youthful mistress-of-the-house is no match for her famous writer husband’s unthinking bonhomie. Oh, and there’s kind of a weird thing in the walls that looks like a slowly necrotising organ.

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This literally ain’t the half of it, but it should give you some idea of the bravado of Aronofsky’s maximalist approach that his film can refer so directly to schlockbusters and old classics alike, often in the same shaky breath: There’s “The Innocents,” Poe‘s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Rebecca” scattered throughout, but there’s also a good helping of “Pacific Heights” and “The Skeleton Key.” At least, there is in the first hour before Lawrence’s character gets pregnant and the film moves into its defiantly uncategorizable second half, when you’re too busy trying to work out if you’re having a heart attack to think about what anything reminds you of. The only way to warn you without spoiling is to say that foolhardy is the soul who believes that, having witnessed what you’ve just witnessed, the film cannot possibly get any more insane. It can always get more insane, and it always does — even after a 20-minute sequence in which a quiet dinner turns into a rave which turns into a riot which turns into a war zone which turns into, I don’t know, a Hieronymous Bosch vision of the Apocalypse as a refugee camp in which extreme rendition is practised? With Kristen Wiig in it?

It could be, and is, so much psychological and physical torture porn visited on Lawrence’s character, but the unswerving focus on her and the favoring of her perspective makes the film also feel curiously protective of her point of view. Libatique’s camera sometimes buzzes round her like a malevolent mosquito, sometimes circles her like a wolf looking for its window of attack, but until the very end it is always in orbit around her, like there’s some intense, black-hole gravity in the center of her being from which it cannot escape. The film’s scorelessness adds to the atmosphere too, with careful sound design enhancing the images without cheating us into an unearned reaction.

In any other actress’ hands, the role might be too frustratingly passive and timorous to relate to, but Lawrence is so wholly committed that it actually morphs into something far more unusual: a portrait of the trophy wife of a Great Man from the point of view of the trophy, and a deeply sympathetic first-person account of the terrors of being vastly younger and less socially confident than the person you love. Youth is usually portrayed as such a desirable characteristic, but here it is her misery and it’s one we suffer along with her — at least up to a point. “Who are you?” breathes Lawrence late on to Bardem. “I am I,” he replies and the weird use of the double-nominative signals the exact moment at which the film makes its final shift from being about her to being about him: he becomes its subject and she, quite literally, its object.

You may get where it is going quite a long time before it gets there, and guess early enough the nature of the massive rough-diamond-like crystal, threaded with veins of fire that we see Bardem crack open from a lump of charred coal in that opening scene. But no matter how sensitive your divining rod, you will absolutely not be prepared for the way Aronofsky takes you there. By the time the film has morphed into a bizarre, noisy, extraordinarily rendered literalization of the most barbaric of Christian rituals, and a balls-to-the-wall acknowledgement of the utter monstrousness of the male creative ego, you will have seen one of our most talented filmmakers act like he’s got nothing to lose, like he’s scooping up everything he’s ever done before and firing it into the sun. In that crucible, the metaphysics of “The Fountain” fuses with the trippiness of “Requiem For a Dream” and the biblical fantasy of “Noah,” and grafts itself onto the hysteria-horror of “Black Swan” and the sheer mindfuckery of “Pi” and the beast that emerges is still something completely new in his canon, as well as anyone else’s. The easily offended, those prone to tachycardia and of course pregnant or breastfeeding women may want to avoid it, but as the inevitable boos that rang out long and lustily in its Venice press screening confirm, “mother!” is something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf. [A]

Check out all our coverage of the 2017 Venice Film Festival here.