Mother!

An admirable creative intention to express a powerful message, carried out in an overly abstract way. But why not? The focus on the main character’s feelings in the first half of the film is so formally precise and psychologically engaging that few living directors would be able to pull it off. Darren Aronofsky knows that and therefore has the courage to go so wild in the second half, like a painter who spontaneously moves his brush, forming a line that is disturbing at first glance but then becomes a unique, valuable feature of the work as a whole. I accept and acknowledge this, and I am delightfully intoxicated with the final impression of the film. (26/11/2017)

There are said to be directors whose unsuccessful films are also worth watching. Aronofsky is lucky in this regard, because his last successful film was The Wrestler. Mother! (how to say it and not offend someone) is a crackling banal story, which you can fit into a few textbook clichés. Darren was able to fill it with chubby and swollen vaginal-biblical symbols, giving all those B-movie replicas the appearance of almost cosmic validity. And, because the first half is harmless and leads nowhere – and it keeps repeating one and the same figure - he has prepared for the finale a delirious journey through the history of violence and a religiosity course for beginners. This director obviously feels like a virtuoso poet, but in reality he's just a stubborn plasterer and handyman. And his paradise gazebo falls apart under his hands. Jennifer Lawrence is not irritating this time. She is completely given herself over to a puppeteer who has no idea why all the threads are wrong and where they actually lead. An ode to the fate of a woman, a mother? Weh. (20/10/2017)

I was pretty bored in the first half of the film. All in all, it irritated me rather than kept me on the edge of my seat. I couldn't help feeling like I was watching an invasion of barbarians into the household of normal, adaptable citizens. I kept waiting for the big twist at the end, but to my surprise, the film ended in a completely predictable way. (06/03/2018)

It was abstract as The Fountain but way more minimalistic. The music creates the tension which is rather distressing and disgusting. On the other hand, you will not understand a single character because of the film’s abstractness and eccentricity. All the actors did a great job but it doesn’t matter because you don’t understand the reason for their emotions. The first half has no logic and the second half is rather brutal. If you forget about the fact that Javier Bardem is actually the only living person in the film, it becomes great. But the director Darren Aronofsky didn’t make it easy for the viewers so you leave the cinema feeling it was one big madness with no logic, which will be confirmed by the final disgusting scenes which did nothing to me at all. (27/12/2017)

An excellently driven absurd thriller that works both as a portrait of an unhealthy relationship, as well as a parable of the relationship of humankind and the figure of the mother or Planet Earth. The second half, unfortunately, drowns into biblical allegories that are literally hair-pulling so even a moron would understand them, which radically affects the thought-provoking aspect. Yeah, God is a smug douchebag, the Scriptures are misinterpreted nonsense, poor life-giving Mother Earth, and humans are idiots… but what else? In the details and in the conclusion, that’s effective, but the impression of a smart film that has something to say vanishes. That said, the intention is commendable, sure. 7/10 (17/10/2017)