One of the most anticipated movies of the festival season, is also one of the most mysterious. Darren Aronofsky is keeping a tight seal on the plot details of “mother!,” his small scale horror starring Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem, which is about a couple who deal with some uninvited guests. The trailers and promos haven’t been giving much away, but instead establish the atmosphere of terror that audiences will be stepping into, and that’s just the way the director wants it. Aronofsky is aiming to lift moviegoers out of their seats.
“It’s a cruise missile shooting into a wall, this film,” he told Vulture. “I want audiences to be prepared for that and prepped that it’s a very intense ride.”
A big part of that intensity will come from Lawrence herself, who will be in pretty much every frame of the movie.
“The film is basically either over her shoulder, on her face, or her POV,” Aronofsky explained. “That’s the only shots. There are a few wide shots when she’s alone. But beyond that, the camera is basically in three places.”
Even more, the actress goes for broke, particularly during the finale, with a performance that was so involved, Lawrence had suits getting worried. “I think she hyperventilated and also kind of threw a rib out,” he recalls. “During the big climax of the movie, I mean, she started … She really went there. The producers were freaking out. We had to sort of calm it down and then go for it again. And the thing is, there’s so much ability there that somehow she can summon it again and again.”
Perhaps the most intriguing thing is that “mother!,” for all its genre trappings, has a larger message lurking underneath.
“There are these huge forces that are happening that you can look at and go, That’s wrong, and yet, no matter how much I scream about it, there’s nothing I can do, and it keeps happening,” the director mused. “I just wanted the movie to howl at the moon.”
“mother!” hits Venice and TIFF and opens on September 15th. Here’s a new poster Aronofsky just shared on Instagram.