I would rather watch the video for the Blondie song on loop for 2 hours than ever watch this again.

Rating: 2/10 (15 December 2019)

How could they let this happen?
Apparently a very polarizing movie. One side says it's dense and incoherent, the other that it's a lot more subtle and nuanced than it might appear on an obvious level.
Something I keep hearing people say about certain movies is "dafuq did I just watch?" And today I am one of them.
While watching the end of this today (I began it over a week ago), I thought to myself that I would say something like "one of those movies that's either super clever or complete trash with no inbetween" but no. I am not going to give this movie the satisfaction. If there is anything to admire in this movie's writing then it was so over my head that I have to strain my neck to see it.
With so many generic, paint by number horrors/thrillers on the market it can be so nice to find something a bit different. Something audacious, something that defies easy categorization and targets the more patient viewers, not the ones that can't take anything different. Even if it isn't a resounding success that it tried to be something fresh will surely win it some points right? But the darker side of experimental art is that it can go so horribly wrong.
I have no intelligent criticisms. This incoherent mess of inexplicable events with infrequent supernatural elements seemingly shoehorned in is simply too much. It feels like a parody without any sense of humor. At least "Epic Movie" had some fun with itself. It's not even sort of fun in how campy and over the top it is, it's like a 2 hour music video without any memorable music. Apparently they used next to no music which I would admire normally since nothing seems to ruin an otherwise good horror than the over use of its score. But that was sadly wasted here.
It keeps its cards close to its chest, but the situation drags on for so long on the same basic idea that you think this must be going somewhere toward some big twist or reveal. Some movies are daring and cool for keeping it mysterious but this just feels the writer kept a dream journal, cherry picked the stuff that sort of felt spooky and just slapped as close to plot as he could around it to cover his tracks, hoping that some of the audience would just assume it was deep. I want a deep movie, I'm not trying to hate on parallel cinema or the avant-garde, but we need to be wary of things that are so style over substance.
I thought at one point maybe the reason I don't get this movie was because it was playing on a very feminine mentality. This wife and soon-to-be mother has married a poet admired by many and only wants to build a household to raise his kids and be near him. But she finds she won't be able to avoid sharing him with his followers as easily as she thought. Tons of visitors being bizarrely bad guests is this movie's favorite gag (or horror equivalent) and it gets old fast. I try to be the best feminist I can be, I get women and girls are just people like me but heteropatriarchal culture maybe gives them a perspective I can only obliquely appreciate. Though this was indeed written by a man I believe. But it can't be that. That only begs the question of...everything else.
I sort of want to admire how it was almost disquieting inexplicable the whole thing is for its first two acts. You get a firm feeling there is something going on that people aren't talking about but it doesn't really work, I guess in part due to no groundwork or good characters.
The movie begins with...well she's sort of on fire. And then there's some kind of house magic. This is a supernatural element but it almost feels like an afterthought. There is an excellent non-supernatural movie in here somewhere they didn't even try to chisel it out. Every marble masterpiece was once just nondescript marble in a chink of rock. And here, they've just left it in.
Early on in the movie I was a bit distracted by how in-your-face the cinematography is. It's almost comical. Almost. I decided early on this movie was made of superior stuff. There was a pretty good atmosphere of quiet dread, or there would have been if they had had less artificial dialogue and better camerawork. Then people come to visit and...I can't even. They don't even try to justify it, it's like they got the wrong script at one point and started making a different movie and didn't edit it out.
And the final act...this bizarre crescendo of craziness. It feels like a creepypasta but extra pretentious. They get so deep into it as a plot with the magical elements so well established that you expect to get some kind of explanation or resolve. But you do not. It seems to think its edgy and challenging but it's just lazily exploiting macabre and emotional tenderness.
And finally Ms Lawrence: is she physically able to play a character in a way that doesn't make me want to punch her in the face? Every role she takes should have gone to Kristen Stewart. There, I said it. Bring on the dislikes, but I am sick of seeing her get all these roles. At least a better actor didn't have to get dragged down with this sickly, arrogant, over-ambitious yet poorly thought through, pseudo-intellectual mess.
The possibility it could be an allegory, let alone one about genesis, never occurred to me. I must be that oblivious. But even if it is allegorical so what? What am I supposed to get out of that? Allegories can be so cool, like Animal Farm, but Animal Farm had a lot of pertinent points to make about freedom of expression and how there are more than two sides in political struggle. How do any parallels in this narrative with Genesis absolve it of anything? I already know genesis and even if it is a variation, it is a lazy variation. The mother is presumably meant to be some Gaia analogue because she's a fertile woman and is fixing a house. She doesn't "give and give and give", is it even her name on the deed? Her husband isn't remotely god-like and if that's the point then why have him there? Is it a comment on the artificiality of religion, the heteropatriarchal biases of culture and how we mistreat our world? Well that's swell but when you're talking about feminism and environmentalism you need more nuance than "they're really good things". The check list of allusions to the bible aren't clever or or interesting, they just seem plagaristic. Literary allusions are cool but they need to be worked into a story that already has substance. The apparently motiveless destruction and abuse by the fans is shallow exactly because they are motiveless. Mr. Aronofsky has realised the delight of a parable: you can do whatever and just tell people its deeper than it looks, character motivation doesn't matter...
It seems this movie is trying to tell us this: the world is in a bit of a mess, we are not treating the environment we live in well even though it is ultimately what sustains us and we are not learning from our mistakes.
But that's the gist of a thousand elementary school assemblies across the world. And they at least got to the point without artificially stretching it to two hours. A 6 year old dressed in a paper mache planet Earth may not be the best actress but at least she's kind of adorable which makes her a lot more fun to watch than most of Lawrence's performances.
I am quite convinced that this movie really had nothing new or pertinent to say; just a very loud way of saying it.