Art House of Horror

Rating: 7/10 (20 September 2017)

******Here Be Spoilers!*******
I enjoyed "Mother!", my biggest gripe being that I thought it was shot with irritatingly low lighting, like I was watching the whole thing through glasses coated with sepia-toned cheesecloth. I found myself squinting at the screen, which, of course, didn't help. I went in having seen the preview trailer a few times (before showings of "Annabelle: The Creation" and "It"), the one that was edited with quick cuts and Bernard Herrmann-like strings. To me that said it was being marketed to the horror crowd; but it was still Aronofsky with Lawrence, Bardem, Harris and Pfieffer. I figured it was going to be more than a horror movie, but seemingly rooted in the horror genre somehow. Maybe that's why I didn't hate it like so many other people seem to.
A jewel is placed in a stand and a burned and rotted house is rejuvenated. A withered corpse under a blanket is breathed back to life, and a day begins. Bardem's male energy is focused on creating a poetic work of art for consumption by the irrational masses of the world, to as he says, "bring life into the house"; Lawrence's female energy is focused on creating a home for him and literally bringing a life into their home in her womb. There are Biblical metaphors (Cain and Abel, who knows how many others?)and problems that 21st Century couples have are introduced. Some are small and comic, some are large, horrid, and hurtful. Then it goes full gonzo-universal, with Lawrence trying to give birth in a war zone inside her own house. The mob perpetrates atrocities. I laughed at times, I was horrified at times. I was confused as to what was happening often. Maybe the jewel is all that's left after the life cycle of the universe goes from Big Bang to inevitable collapse and re-ignition. Maybe Bardem as "Him" is a sadistic demon or a masochistic wizard, with "mother" Lawrence as his suffering muse.In the end, what does it mean? Who knows? Why are people so angry at this movie? Who knows? With Edgar Allen Poe and Alfred Hitchcock, audiences are content with a few scares and a few twists, so why not Aronofsky? At the end of "The Cask of Amontillado" the reader gets a chill of realization that a character is being bricked up behind a wall to be left to die for revenge. (That was included in "Tales of Terror" a 1962 horror film with Vincent Price.) At the end of "The Birds" we never know why the birds came, and Suzanne Pleshette and others have died grisly deaths for no reason except some possible metaphor. At the end of "Psycho" the big reveal that Anthony Perkins is insane and mother was long dead is a crowd-satisfying twist. But Janet Leigh's body is still in the trunk, having died for nothing. Was it all just torture porn? No, a mystery has been solved. So Bardem places a new jewel in the stand, and the cycle starts again, with him as the demon/wizard/poet, and a new woman appears as his muse. We know what she's in for; the horror. The reveal of a twist; the end. "Mother!" took me for a ride worth taking. It made me laugh, gave me a start or two and made me think. It was well-acted, and contained moments of insight into the human condition. Good enough for me.