mother! (Darren Aronovsky, 2017)

Isn't that poster a thing of true hideousness? Anyway, there are certainly spoilers in what follow... To begin with I enjoyed this very much. Claustrophobically close-up camera work on Jennifer Lawrence (who I thought did creditably throughout, particularly early on when a certain stiffness or blankness in her performance very effectively amplifies the sensation of always being the last to know) is combined with the usual horror clichés (curious little sounds, sudden jump scares), all adding up to a very funny rendition of that feeling of having people descend on your house for reasons that escape you and then refuse to bloody well leave. The mechanisms may be transparent but the tension was deliciously maintained. (Michelle Pfeiffer is also deliciously waspish.) After which, unfortunately, things begin to escalate in a kind of sub-Kaufmann fashion (think Synechdoche, New York all happening much faster with a great deal more – entirely predictable – violence) and the sheer muddled banality of the allegory makes itself more and more apparent. I've got sympathy with A.O. Scott's recommendation: "don't listen to anyone who natters on about how intense or disturbing it is; it's a hoot!", but I couldn't spot the "churning intellectual energy" he sees at work. Aronovsky seems to think that allegory is a matter of making parallels which then justify themselves, simply by being parallels. Oh, Ed Harris has a wound in his side because he's Adam, so Eve is surely about to turn up. But why is Adam on the verge of death? Oh, who cares, it lets us bring in Cain and Abel so that things can start to get violent... We need a flood! Get some people to sit on a sink, then... The most coherent thing I could extract is that Bardem (as God) represents male creative energies while Lawrence (the Earth Mother) represents the feminine. The film thinks it's critiquing the patriarchal, male-centred traditions of religion, art and capitalist extraction (no theme too big or obvious for Aronovsky), but it appears to be entirely unaware that its representation of Woman (non-intellectual, hard working and uncomplaining – well she has a moment of complaint when things get really bad, but acquiesces happily enough at the very end – whose real function is to bring life into the world) operates entirely according to the same misogynist logic as the representation of "God as Man" it wants to attack. (I also imagine that Aronovsky intended to attack Christianity in general with the baby-eating scene, but he ends up rehashing age-old anti-Catholic propaganda. Perhaps that was the point but such subtle niceties seem quite beyond this film...) For some reviewers, inexplicably, this kind of thing passes for profundity; I think it's the kind of thing that gives allegory a bad name. I would watch the first half again, though.