mother! (2017) is a slamming punch to the face—a descent from taut, domestic psychodrama to full-throttle hermeneutic madness. In director Darren Aronofsky’s words, it is “a fever dream,” dabbling in feminism, filmmaking, and biblical allegory. While all of this could make for a truly impactful film, mother! instead flounders in a sea of sensory overload and delirium, perhaps in an attempt to mask the film’s shallowness.
It must be noted, however, that despite its other shortcomings mother! is a remarkably well-made film. From mise-en-scene to cinematography to sound, Aronofsky’s craftsmanship is in peak form throughout. Unfortunately, mother!’s cinematic merits are tainted by its masquerade as a feminist narrative.
mother! is sympathetic to its titular character’s gendered struggle. Told from her perspective—the camera rarely strays from an unnerving closeup of Lawrence’s face—Aronofsky seeks to understand his character’s servile domesticity and blind devotion to her negligent husband. Unfortunately, as the narrative progresses, it subjects mother to the cruelest forms of torment and suffering, in the most uncomfortable and quasi-pornographic detail.
There is nothing wrong with portraying extreme human suffering on film if it serves a meaningful point. mother!, however, has no truly meaningful point. Beyond surface-level commentary on obsessive artists and marital breakdown, it is mostly a biblical allegory, yet the theological “insight” that Aronofsky offers is nothing that a cursory read of the book of Genesis would not provide. Aronofsky has not improved much from the hollow polemics of his previous film, Noah (2014). He uses his films as an arena to rant about his conflicted religious identity, but none of this remotely justifies the viciousness of his artistic approach. All mother! is doing is regurgitating the same images of violence against women that have saturated cinema for a century, alluding to self-reflexivity with its artistic filter, but only scratching at the surface.