WARNING : This review contain spoilers.
This movie is not even on my radar up until few weeks ago when one of my twitter friend keeps tweeting about it. Of course I dig up more about the film after that as it’s directed by Aronofsky, the person behind Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream. Classified as one of the most insane film from recent years by some critics, I couldn’t wait to watch ‘mother!‘ and was expecting another out of box horror flick, maybe another Get Out (because this year we got so many good horror flicks, 2017 is a good year for the genre).
I WAS WRONG.
It was not another horror flick, not even something different like Get Out. This is something else. This is completely off the rails. One thing I like about big studios in Hollywood is we get some formulaic popcorn shit like Transformers which did well in box then we get something like this from the same studio. Something like this will never be able to sell in cinema, I am sure they knew it. Film like this will never be able to hit the box office, it will be something discussable among movie geek and years later will hit cult status – written more about than watched.
Some people will really hate this film (at least I have known numbers of them in my theatre as they walked out not even an hour after the film started lol) and I get it why. It was falsely advertised as horror ‘home invasion’ film and it’s not helping to see familiar Hollywood’s sweetheart face – Jennifer Lawrence as the leading actress. People going to cinema expecting something else, something ordinary and believe me, you will still questioning wtf you are watching even after an hour into the film.
This film is meant to NOT be taken directly or else you will be drown in your own confusion. It is one of the film which contain a lot of symbolism and it’s up to you how you want to interpret it. As for me, I see the movie as the earth and humankind creation process from the beginning to the end – apocalypse. Javier Bardem character is symbolic of god, created mother, symbolic for earth (Jeniffer Lawrence). They’re living together before one day a man (Adam, the first man) arrives at their door. Mother never like the man from the beginning because she knew it, human is the real threat for their life/home (earth). The god created Eve, the first woman from Adam’s rib (we can see the man got nasty wound on his ribs in toilet scene). The workplace is Garden of Eden, the crystal is forbidden fruit, and then we get Adam and Eve’s sons coming to the house (of course they are symbolic for Cain and Abel I get all of this from here when one of them was dead, killed by another). Later on, we got to see scene like sink breaks scene where ‘human’ goes out of control and started to breaking the ‘law’ – hurting ‘mother’s’ feeling and then there comes the consequences – the sink breaks (the big flood). We also got to see Jesus being made scene (lol). I am not gonna elaborate it more, I think you get it from now. It ends with apocalypse, when the ‘mother’ can’t hold it anymore.
The last 40 minutes of the film is crazy and terrifying. I wish I can un-see some scene, as it is still haunting me until now. The second half of movie changes from slow paced to the ‘wtf is going on can we get a break for a second’ paced as so many things happened toward the final act. I beg to differ from some critics when they said this is a movie about Christianity – a bible-based film. Yes, the allegories are all there but I think the main point of this film is to show us how we human destroyed everything had by mother earth. Maybe this film is not all about Christianity, maybe it is also meant to be an environmental film. Remember a line from Kristen Wiig’s character? “It’s so hot here, don’t you feel hot?”. I bet she is talking about global warming!
‘mother!’ is not typical Hollywood film. Film like this usually made and done for art-house cinema, starred by unknown actors. Marketed as a totally different film with numbers of A-list star in it, I get why some people so angry and frustrated going out from cinema but believe me, this is something else, a roller coaster ride of watching film while challenging your mind to understand and interpret layer by layer of the storyline. Once you get to decode it, you can understand the film more and get what it’s all about and maybe after that, you will realize how we human are destroying the earth all this time. So, after this you should start recycling more unless you want to keep hurting mother earth till she got angry and burns everything (lol).
Psss: I get it if you hate this film, even me don’t know whether I like it or not but this film is unquestionably brilliant.
