Review of mother! (2017) by Juji O — 17 Sep 2017

"This movie wasn't made for the critics" and "I made this movie for the fans" are phrases typically used by film directors when their movie was supposed to be a Hollywood blockbuster, but ends up being a flop and a critical failure. I really don't like those two phrases. When I here something along the lines of those two phrases come out of a director trying to defend his movie, that tells me that he knows he made a bad movie and is relying on the loyalty of the fans to make the movie a financial success. Audiences are looking for a good time, while critics look for what makes a movie good. That is the idea that film production companies rely on. Although I consider movies "being made just for the fans" to be usually be bad movies, the opposite of that phrase is quite interesting. Movies made for the critics. These kinds of movies are made by people that have a love of film, and are just trying make a quality work of art, instead of solely focussing on making an entertaining experience. These are the movies that critics like. That is what this movie, 'mother!', is like. It is a movie made for the critics, and meant to be a parable, a statement, and a work of art. .

After seeing trailers and initial thoughts by several film critics, I thought this was going to be a confusing David Lynch like film where the true narrative of the movie will never be understood. I was wrong. Although I would consider this movie to be weird, like a David Lynch movie, the narrative is more straight forward. This movie has a statement, and it uses symbolism, metaphors, and allegory in order to express this statement. This is a thinking mans movie, and if you don't like that, then you best stay away.

Literally, this movie is about a couple who have rude and violent unwanted guests break into their home, and there is no way of stopping them from destroying the house that they have worked to hard to build. Allegorically, however, this movie is about God, the earth, and the people who destroy it. This movie serves as a message of the things we humans are doing to this planet. But instead of showing us this message literally, it takes a more artsy route in order to give us this message.

Avant garde is the best way I can describe this movie. What makes a work of art avant garde is it's new and unusual experimental ideas. Many indie filmmakers that fancy themselves avant gardists tend to express fairly simple ideas in unusual ways for the sake of being weird and having style. Much of their art didn't necessarily have to be experimental and unusual, but it is anyways just for the sake of being unusual. This film, however, although being an avant garde work of art, isn't experimental and unusual for the sake of it. The director, Darren Aronofsky, purposely told his story in form of parable and allegory, not to make his film weird and/or stylish, but to give us a much more grounded perspective of the grand scale message he is trying to tell us. Such a message that I could not have seen represented in a better way, and runs by me as nothing short of genius.

With such a surreal narrative, it's difficult to write this movie with a consistent tone and mood. But not for Darren Aronofsky. According to him, he became so angry with the world and the way humans were treating it, that he spent five days of his life writing the script for this movie, pouring out of him like a fever dream. And it shows. This movie is the closest depiction of a nightmare that I've seen on film. This movie is a steap and steady descent into madness, fueled by nothing but anger and rage. Anger against humanity and their defiling of the earth. This movie puts you in the center of the madness, designed to make you confused and frantic, just like mother nature would feel about the humans and what they're doing to the earth if she was sentient.

This is not a fun movie, but an unsettling one. It's art for arts sake. If you watch movies just to have a good time, you won't like this movie. If you do not have a love for film and filmmaking, you will not like this movie. If you don't want to have to think a lot in order to understand a movie, you won't like this movie. If you don't have a basic working knowledge of the bible and it's stories, you'll find this movie difficult to understand. However, if you do love film and filmmaking, if you do like thinking movies, if you watch movies to experience a work of art instead of watching them merely for entertainment, then the opposite is true. If so, then chances are that you'll love this movie, as did I. .

This is quite possibly my favorite movie of the year, and I'm going to give this an.

18/20.