The Culmination of Aronofsky's Works

Rating: 9/10 (15 October 2017)

'Mother', the latest film from Darren Aronofsky, starts off with an enigmatic shot of a scene near the end of the film, before we're introduced to a couple who live in a house, Mother (Jennifer Lawrence), and Him (Javier Bardem), an artist struggling with writers block. One day somebody comes into the house, and this creates a divide between Mother and Him, pulling them further apart as the film progresses. Darren Aronofsky has described his film as a roller-coaster ride, focusing on the slow, steady climb, which is the gradually mounting dread and unease, before plummeting straight down in its final act, which is an explosion of frenzied insanity, chaos, and destruction. This film also leaves a lingering impression, both on the surface level and the underlying ideas it expresses, and in way, it's the kind of film that begins when it's over, shifting in your mind to become something different than what you experienced in the cinema, and we don't get too many films like that these days.
For all the the comparisons that could be made with the early work of Roman Polanski, such as 'Repulsion' and 'Rosemary's Baby', 'Mother!' has no subtlety or restraint, no basis in character, psychology, or realism, instead opting for a freak show of garish, grotesque, extreme, and visceral excesses. The film only ever relents as a ruse, before thrusting us back into a nightmarish and unbearable insanity that is at once outrageous, exhilarating, and horrifying, displaying ghastly extremities of human behaviour, and a boundless energy and imagination that never once opts for the predictable, only the inevitable, continually pushing as far as it can be taken, even crossing the line, and proceeding to go further. It has the same frenetic intensity as the final montage in 'Requiem for a Dream', combined with the biblical mythology of 'Noah', the ambitious grasping's of 'The Fountain' and 'Pi', and the delirious insanity of 'Black Swan'. In a sense, this feels like the inverse of that films suggestion of the protagonists struggle with mental illness, instead depicting the rest of the world as insane, while our titular character Mother represents the order trying so desperately to hold it together.
The film works on multiple levels, as a blackly absurd farce, feverish nightmare, home-invasion thriller, and eco-parable. The characters aren't realistic or believable, but symbolic, which works for what the film's trying to achieve, and leads into the endless amount of interpretations and layers of meaning one can extrapolate from this film, which can leave one thinking and debating long after it's over, as well as stick with you for days, weeks, months, years even. It addresses terrorism, refugees, police brutality, imprisonment, marital breakdown, celebrity, martyrdom, biblical mythology, climate change, politics, artistic inspiration, and I'm sure it doesn't end there. This is a film with such ambitious aspirations, yet distills it into one location, and mostly into the final act. The films extremities and absurdities reflect the state of the world in a way only great surrealism can. This is a film that can stand alongside the great surrealist work of Buñuel, Cronenberg, Gilliam, and Lynch, that keeps pushing the boundaries, and is uncompromisingly the work of a singular vision, which is especially an achievement given it's such a mainstream film.
This film demonstrates Darren Aronofsky as a provocateur and showman as much as an artist, seeking to divide people, rouse controversy, stir strong reactions, and get people talking about it, and that in itself is admirable, even necessary, especially in a world with so many safe and pandering blockbusters. Moreover, Darren Aronofsky strikes me as someone who's gotten all this anxiety, frustration, and negativity off his chest by writing it all down and filming it. That's what art can do, give you permission to confront the deepest darkest aspects of the psyche, and healthily relinquish it. Therefor Aronofsky comes off as calm and reasonable, with strong ideas of what the film's about, but open to anyone's interpretations. 'Mother!' Is a film that works on both a visceral and intellectual level, a roller-coaster ride of insanity that provokes thought and discussion, that mingles spine-tingling excitement with ghastly shocks and underlying anger about the state of the world, whilst pushing the envelope and bringing an individualist sensibility to a mainstream movie. This is a film I imagine will stick with me for a long time.