Coming from a Christian viewpoint: An interesting and artistic film that falls apart in the narrative department

Rating: 7/10 (26 August 2018)

I just want to set a little disclaimer: I am a Christian who has read the entirety of the Bible several times, so my view of "mother!" may be a little different than those who have not read it.
My guess is that this film was made for people who casually know parts of the Bible. If you know too much of the bible then this film is dull/offensive. If you don't know enough of the bible then the whole shtick of the film is meaningless and probably very confusing.
Moving on.
From an artistic standpoint, this film is pretty good. I like the way that the camera always stays super close to the "mother" character which creates a dizzying/disorienting effect as she walks around the house due to the high levels of parallax and what not. Very smart choice in direction, as this immediately creates a sense of tension and intensity even when not much is going on. I could complain a little bit about how certain elements of this film feel like they were taken from "Children of Men", which is another film that contains religious imagery/symbolism, but for the most part this film is pretty fresh and feels like its own thing.
One small nitpick I have is that the sound design was a bit frustrating at times. There were several scenes where mother's footsteps sounded distinctly like sandbags and seemed to be repeated on loop.

Now, onto the meat of the movie. Spoilers!
The film is essentially an allegory for the old/new testaments in the Christian Bible, which is both interesting yet also dangerous for the viewing experience. I went into this movie pretty much blind, so as soon as I realized it was retelling the Old Testament I became both excited and concerned. I was excited because I thought it was a neat idea to set up the Bible in a sort of "stage play" fashion, where time jumps super quickly all within the same setting and actors kind of just come and go as they please. (or maybe this was supposed to be a reference in the Bible where it describes God's perception of time is both faster and slower than ours, but who knows). However, my concerns were that the film would become highly predictable without any real twists or turns, which would be kind of hard to do without offending a ton of people (though I don't Aronofsky really cares about that).
And, unfortunately, this film is insanely predictable and has trouble deciding whether it is an allegory or not.
Some of the scenes in this film are so on the nose that I actually burst out laughing, like where "Him" who is an other (that represents God) has some ink on his thumbs and accidentally presses it onto someone's forehead so then everyone else starts doing, or where we are told early on in the movie "don't sit on that sink, it's not stable" so then I was just waiting for it to break to symbolize the flood from Genesis. These on the nose elements are amusing at times, but they also distract from the film because they aren't helping push the story along, which is probably the film's biggest issue...
The movie jumps between allegory and an actual original narrative (or else Aronofsky hasn't done a ton of biblical research) and it doesn't know which one it is trying to be.
Essentially, this movie's version of God is a being who loves to create, loves attention, but doesn't care about morality. It ruins the allegory when it tries to follow the narrative of Old Testament (for the most part) very closely, but then the character of God has no sense of morality. If this were a satire/critique on religion then that would make sense within the context of the movie, but the movie seems to be fairly genuine in its attempt at loosely retelling the bible (even down to the sound of coins dropping in the background before a miracle baby is murdered by a crowd).
For instance, the mother character and the poet both seem to have attributes of God, which doesn't really work if this is an allegory. The mother character is constantly the one who is mad at people for ruining things, causing danger, acting sinfully, and doing other despicable stuff when they were told explicitly not to do so, but then the Poet character is completely fine with all of these things because he loves people, attention, and wants everyone to have a home with him. This becomes a bit confusing because, in the Bible, God embodies both of those personalities: Loving but also wanting Justice. For the Poet to be okay with the actions of all of the people (and their Pagan rituals which they start performing) kind of breaks the allegory. You can't have a movie about God and the bible if you don't understand what God's narrative was in the bible.
Another example would be the miraculous child. In the Bible, the purpose of Jesus was to save humanity from sin, but in this movie the Poet simply wants to show off his child and a crowd kills the child and starts eating it. It's supposed to represent communion, but the film depicts it as a horror scene (as if it is a bad thing) when the whole point of communion is an analogy for Christ's sacrifice. You can't have a scene celebrating Christ's sacrifice but then depict the people who are celebrating it as cannibals as a critique on the very action itself, which was the original sacrifice . If they were trying to be allegorical, then the Poet would be trying to save the people in their house from themselves and his child would give the crowd insight right before being murdered.
Most of what I'm saying is probably going over the heads of most people so I will stop rambling. If this movie were trying to be a critique I could understand its changes, but it's not. It just kind of follows the bible very closely and then will throw in some bits that fit more of a character narrative. It's constantly bouncing between whether it wants to tell a story or if it is just telling the bible, and this lack of focus makes it hard to enjoy either half.
Still, the film is well shot and interesting, so I can't really hate it. It has some neat ideas here and there and while I disagree with it's depiction of God, I can still appreciate the effort that went into it.