mother!

Crazy, brilliant, confused… These are all words that have been used not just to describe me, but also to describe Daronofsky’s (Black Swan, Noah) latest psychological chiller: Mother! Well, armed with a doctor and a social worker, I felt duly prepared to experience this movie for myself and went along to Cinema City to find out what this bubble of psycho-babble was all about.

Mother! starts off being about a couple, played by Javier Bardem and Jennifer Lawrence, who are existing in a state of rural solitude; he a writer struggling for inspiration and she his younger wife who splits her time between refurbishing the classic, octagonal, wooden country house and over-analysing how much her hubby loves her. Just when something needs to happen, it does. Enter Ed Harris’ mysterious COPD ridden physician and his sultry, opinion-happy wife, Michelle Pfieffer who start to simultaneously stimulate Bardem’s poetic procrastination and Lawrence’s relationship paranoia. Soon things are wonderfully uneasy – and that’s before someone gets beaten to death with a brass doorknob. From here the movie accelerates into a downward spiral of unease and tension, as the number of intruders into the couple’s secluded existence – and the dramatic confrontations that they bring as baggage - start to increase exponentially. I can’t really tell you any more of the synopsis lest I drop a spoiler, but suffice to say that things get fucked up, then they get really fucked up, then it’s over.

This film is divisive. I don’t just mean between different viewers, indeed I’m personally divided as to whether I liked it, whether I’m supposed to like it (the fact that I don’t think I am makes me like it more, perversely), or even whether I want to like it. So, let’s cut to the chase and talk pros and cons.

The performances in this claustrophobic fever-dream of a movie are fantastic, and performed with relish by everyone involved. In fairness, I would imagine that you don’t read a script like this one and sign up without knowing what you’re getting yourself into. The cinematography (take a bow Matthew Libatique), direction, and editing all combine to make a head-spinning cluster-fuck (in a good sense) of a visual experience that serves to bolster the fear of anticipation that the increasing frenzy of a plot is serving up, and what a recipe that is. A cinematic fusion of close, intrusive shots over character’s shoulders and in their faces, mixed with fast dolly shots through the increasingly invaded house of horror are used skilfully to precisely mirror the descent into madness being experienced by Lawrence’s increasingly desperate and disturbed protagonist. I remarked to my companions that one scene quite remarkably mirrored a reoccurring dream that I used to have, but in retrospect of course, that is this film’s modus operandi.