the best horror film in the last decade; a masterpiece!

Rating: Null/10 (7 September 2017)

Just saw mother! at the Venice Film Festival and what an absolute pleasure it was to watch. What an absolute pleasure! I won't get too much into the plot as to avoid spoilers, and quite honestly the less you know about this film the better the viewing experience will be. This grandeur horror film stars Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Kristen Wiig, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domnhall Gleeson and Brian Gleeson. Star studded enough for you yet? The film (loosely) is about a young pregnant woman who lives with her poet husband in the countryside until unexpected guests start to invade her home. Sounds like your typical home invasion horror movie, right? Wrong. Darren Aronofsky has created something completely different here. Something absolutely amazing that provoked such a haunting reaction in me that I haven't felt since the first time I watched the star gate sequence in Stanley Kubrick's masterful '2001 A Space Odyssey.'And yes, I am comparing mother! to 2001 A Space Odyssey, because mother! is simply that masterful.
The film is steeped in allegories and mystical symbolism and satires a variety of themes. The film itself starts off relatively calm until the visitors arrive and invade their home (I must be brief as it is vital not to spoil this film.) However, in its second and third act, the film derails into some of the most terrifying, disturbing and absolutely haunting piece of art ever put on film. It is most definitely the most controversial film since A Clockwork Orange, or perhaps Gaspar Noe's shocking rape revenge film 'Irreversible.' I have watched films all my life and never have I seen something in the last decade this truly scary.
It is the type of horror that goes right through your skin, and your bones, and psychologically affects you. Combine that with beautiful art, breathtaking performances from Jennifer Lawrence and Michelle Pfeiffer in particular, and absolutely lunacy, you get this brilliant avante-garde piece of filmmaking, known as 'mother!.' mother! is truly the best horror film of the last decade without a doubt, whilst also being the craziest. mother! is sure to be a divisive movie, some may label it pretentious and some may label it as weird and disturbing for the sake of being weird and disturbing without having any contextual justification towards its haunting scenes of violence and gore. However, they could not be so far from the truth.
mother!, simply put, is a masterpiece, and I honestly cannot think of a film in the last decade that has scared me and disturbed me as much as mother!. It is a must see movie.