Review of Mother (2016) by Grant S — 20 Jul 2018

Pretentious and annoying.

A married couple live in an isolated country house. He is a celebrated poet, suffering from writer's block, and she is working on renovating the house. Then a guest, a stranger, suddenly drops in and nothing will ever be the same again.

Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky who gave us masterpieces like 'The Wrestler' and 'Requiem for a Dream', as well as the excellent 'Black Swan'. The fact that he wrote and directed this was the only reason I watched it, hoping that he was back to the form of those movies as his previous movie was the craptacular-beyond-belief 'Noah'.

Unfortunately, no, he isn't, though initially there was a glimmer of hope. The movie started interestingly enough, with some decent character development and some interesting themes. However, from the outset it was slow, plus there were signs this wasn't going to be a character-based drama but something symbolic, and pretentious.

Plus it was annoying. The only likeable character was Jennifer Lawrence's. Javier Bardem's was selfish and egotistical and every single other character was incredibly irritating.

Still, I was hoping this would all develop into something interesting and profound. Wrong again. It develops into anarchy and some sort of badly-thought-out horror movie, and the annoyance factor gets pushed to the max. Of course, it's all meant to be symbolic, but figuring out everything would require you to think about the movie, and do so you would have had to have concentrated all through the tidal wave of excrement that was the movie.

Pretentious and annoying, and evidence that, sadly, Darren Aronofsky has run out of ideas.