I want to be alone

Rating: 6/10 (3 May 2018)

I can't help feeling that the story of "Mother!" was written by someone who never got over being rudely intruded upon when they were in the bathroom.
"Mother!" is chock full of phobias including some most of us can relate to with invasion of personal space the most prominent. For me it is an effective horror story until about the three-quarter mark. Then it ends up in the same kind of mess as Ben Wheatley's "High Rise".
Writer/director Darren Aronofsky started out with a fascinating scenario. A successful author simply called 'Him' (Javier Bardem) moves to a large secluded house in the country with his pregnant wife, 'Mother' (Jennifer Lawrence). It seems they both welcome the solitude. However when he invites a stranger into their home it leads to more and more unexpected guests arriving and also the arrival of hordes of the author's fans. He seems to welcome the attention while she feels besieged.
Before the script and film heads way over-the-top, there are some nicely observed touches, especially the uninvited guests who turn nasty when they are rejected, and Bardem's author who seems prepared to sacrifice just about anything for adulation and flattery. On the other hand, Mother slowly cracks up as gatecrashers pop out of every crevice.
There is confronting nastiness in "Mother!" But that's fine; it's a horror movie. What isn't fine is that it all becomes rather tedious, eventually giving way to Peter Greenaway inspired excess - "Baby of Macon" comes to mind. At the end there is even a touch of that mother of all round-trip horror movies, "Dead of Night".
According to an interview with Jennifer Lawrence, there is subtext in "Mother!" including allegory for the rape of Mother Earth plus references to God as well as Adam and Eve. Signals I found difficult to receive out of the unrelenting chaos. I'm surprised we didn't end up with a Blake Edwards-style pie fight - that's what he seemed to do when he didn't know what to do next.