Aronofsky's allegorical horror is his best film this century

Rating: 8/10 (14 September 2019)

A poet and his seemingly mentally unstable wife live in isolation - him staringly seeking inspiration, her doing up a house which has seen better days - until they open the door to a stranger, and to a great deal else.
Darren Aronofsky made a name for himself with his first feature, Pi, a moderately successful cult film, followed by a powerful if straightforward adaptation of Hubert J. Selby's Requiem for a Dream, before directing and mostly scripting a series of less impressive outings (The Wrestler and Black Swan being particularly overrated) ending in the dreadful Noah. Certain critics are still keen to keep praising him as a director of vision, but the ideas have just not been there.
Until Mother! that is, a sporadically nerve-jangling, hardly-dare-watch home invasion drama (though an unusual one, it has to be said) that aims to be an allegory on the Human Condition, touching on themes of mental illness, the role of women, relationships and abuse, the pitfalls of celebrity and fame, mass psychology, the origin of religious cults and goodness knows what else. The basic plot bears some resemblance to the story of Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath had it been directed by Ken Russell, with Javier Bardem as a self-obsessed Hispanic Hughes and Jennifer Lawrence, through whose eyes we see events, as a kind of timid, interior-decorating Plath, as well as a possibly unhinged and unreliable narrator.
It's an ambitious project and to an extent it works, making Aronofsky's best film to date, though the climactic violence takes a very unpleasant turn, and the viewer may be left wondering why there is no police involvement earlier on, as well as longing for a reasonable explanation of events.