Apocalypse House

Rating: 4/10 (8 October 2017)

Writer-director Darren Aronofsky's typically audacious and unnerving, though hopelessly demented and baleful psychodrama is sure to divide critics and audiences with its in-your-face amalgamation of sheer emotional duress coupled with violence brought on by panic and fear. The whole film is full of suppressed anger about to boil over, paranoia churning itself slowly in the gut until it becomes a crippling affliction. An isolated country house is being renovated by a married couple with hidden emotional issues; he's a famous poet suffering a case of writer's block, she's a giver who always puts her husband's needs ahead of hers. Mistaking the couple's home one night for a bed-and-breakfast, a man who claims to be an orthopedic surgeon charms the husband enough to be invited to stay the night; in quick succession, the stranger is joined by his aggressive wife and then by his two belligerent sons, whose angry altercation results in death. This is merely the first part of the story; Aronofsky gives us a bit of a reprieve midway wherein old wounds have peacefully healed, but it's just the calm before the next storm. "Mother!" has been called a religious allegory, its location representing the Garden of Eden and the wife standing in for Mother Earth herself. The rampant, heavy-going symbolism is already being debated, as well as the film's circular ending--but how is it as an entertainment? Aronofsky stumbles early with his script by introducing a central female character (Jennifer Lawrence) who--for the sake of the story--must be vacuous and shell-shocked. Still, turning feisty Lawrence into a human prop doesn't do her or the film any favors. This is the kind of idiot role lesser actresses than Lawrence might have turned down (the kind of part that lost people's interest in Renee Zellweger). The character of the wife must be paralyzed with an inability to jump into action if this plot is to unfold the way it does, and yet we end up not having any attachment to her or sympathy for her since she isn't allowed to be spirited. As the husband, Javier Bardem has even less to work with; he's volatile and irrational and narcissistic--all for the author's own sake--and we lose touch with him almost immediately. One might argue that's the point, he isn't meant to be likable--he draws strangers to him while rebuffing the one person who loves him--but all this is in the service of a mechanical plot which, in its very inception, is muddled, maddening and insipid--an apocalyptic nightmare with seemingly no boundaries. Aronofsky, who reportedly wrote the screenplay in just five days, is playing fancy-free with his own private set of rules. He's amusing himself by toying with viewers, but this could eventually backfire on him. If in "Mother!" the earth suddenly split apart and swallowed the house, that would make about as much sense as what does happen in the picture. Aronofsky is a filmmaker with great talent but no discipline, and "Mother!" is his folly; inflated with ego masquerading as imagination, it also showcases a nasty, bitter side which may be nothing more than contempt for the audience. *1/2 from ****