A satiric allegory

Rating: 8/10 (26 September 2017)

For those of you wondering about the sacrilegious content of this film, in my estimation, this film is ultimately critical of humanity as a whole (and therefore all religion), and not specifically critical of the Abrahamic religions, although it uses an often profane and shocking allegory about humanity's corrupt misinterpretation of the Old and New Testaments to get at its critiques of humanity.
That said, not only am I going to write a 8/10 review of a movie that everyone seems to 10/10 LOVE or 1/10 HATE, but I'm also going to talk about this contriversial ironic allegory without using spoiler-examples to explain my points. I must love down-votes.
mother! is, without doubt, the most aggressive movie that Aronofsky has written and directed. Though many of his movies have either profane content or intellectual challenges, this one is shocking for people of the Abrahamic religions en masse, and it has a layered intellectual challenge to it.
The first challenge, for anyone seeing the movie without prior knowledge, is "what the hell am I watching?". Neither absurd/surreal movies, nor allegorical ones usually come with A-list stars and a name director, let alone anything this cruel and grotesque. And here I will spread the blame for people's mid-movie anger on two causes: 1) The film was sold as a horror movie in some quarters, which is the latest example of a battle that's been raging between filmmakers and suits for decades: don't misrepresent a movie in marketing for short-term opening weekend gain and long-term bad word of mouth. Nearly anyone who went to this movie in order to get a horror-genre fix left infuriated. 2) The fact that American audiences react with indignant cries of "pretentious crap!" when they don't immediately understand a movie can be blamed on both individual closed-mindedness and insecurity, AND on Hollywood conditioning audiences to expect easily-understood wish-fulfillment. You don't have to search real far to find the user reviews reacting to all of this. (Tangentially, we need more articles saying "Hey, *none* of us immediately understand challenging movies, and we're not supposed to understand them immediately, so would you please stop being mad and insecure about it?")
That said, allegory itself has been derided for being a narrative form with a low ceiling: either the allegorical correspondences and analogies are off, or the didactic intent is for the unsubtle browbeating of the unsophisticated. I'm not sure that I can blame viewers for reacting to the allegory as a form, or this one as heavy-handed, though I think the movie rises above these problems. Here is where the second layer of intellectual challenge happens in mother!, and where it is most diabolical: 1) allegory dates as far back in the Abrahamic religions as you care to go, and allegorical interpretation (sometimes forced) has been practiced by scholars in those religions for centuries. Therefore allegory is a fitting form to use to criticize humanity's willful misinterpretations. 2) The movie's allegory is chock-full of challenging (or if you please, blasphemous) ironies that amount to something akin to a 21st century Gnosticism. 3) The allegory here is NOT in a point-for-point correspondence, but asks the audience to abstract a bit since there are several analogies running in parallel here, and they interact in a fairly unstable Moby Dick kind of way (sometimes the whale is just a whale). Combine these three things with the profane content of the film and you have a work that is profane in the way that all great satire must be, and in the way that may prevent it from being received more comprehendingly. However, I think it should be received in this way: the target of attack here is human interpretation; the attack is on what kinds of behavior humanity will excuse by willfully interpreting their own religion until they get what they want the answer to be. This mother ultimately objects and the audience like the humans in the movie say "But mom.... dad said I could!".
As for the other filmmaking elements beside the narrative, they are flawless.
I'm grading mother! at 8/10, with the main flaws being that the didactic side is (necessarily) heavy-handed, and that the movie probably wouldn't wouldn't sustain more than two viewings worth of interest.