mother! (2017)
Directed by Darren Aronofsky
A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence.
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28 films that influenced mother!
What critics say influenced mother!
Writer-director Darren Aronofsky wants to have his commercial cake and chomp down on some vexing personal issues, too, in mother!, a very Rosemary’s Baby-like intimate horror tale that definitely grabs your attention and eventually soars well over the top to make the bold concluding statement that, for some creators, art is more important than life.
You could say that Aronofsky is drawing on “The Shining” (the isolated setting and Bardem’s stony resentment) and also on “Rosemary’s Baby,” the greatest of all paranoid horror films.
In his first film since the 2014 Noah, Aronofsky sifts through Roman Polanski’s wastebasket and weeds out a little Repulsion here, a lot of Rosemary’s Baby there.
To compare Mother! to other mama-minded thrillers like Rosemary’s Baby, Don’t Look Now, Antichrist and The Babadook is almost selling it short.
Unlike The Yellow Wallpaper—or Rosemary’s Baby, for that matter, another work exploring the gaslighting of a pregnant woman—Aronofsky’s film is ultimately concerned with the parasitic nature of the male artist; how he drains the lifeblood from all those around him in the name of creativity and ego fuel.
The Polanski Rosemary’s Baby influence is in there, too, obviously, with its diabolical menagerie focused on a woman’s swelling uterus.
There are real echoes of Roman Polanski's Repulsion, a masterful portrait of mental decay in an apartment that seems to turn on its female inhabitant (Catherine Deneuve).
In his first film since the 2014 Noah, Aronofsky sifts through Roman Polanski’s wastebasket and weeds out a little Repulsion here, a lot of Rosemary’s Baby there.
This literally ain’t the half of it, but it should give you some idea of the bravado of Aronofsky’s maximalist approach that his film can refer so directly to schlockbusters and old classics alike, often in the same shaky breath: There’s “The Innocents,” Poe‘s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Rebecca” scattered throughout, but there’s also a good helping of “Pacific Heights” and “The Skeleton Key.”
This is staged like a home invasion for Lawrence that is not unlike Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs.
And if that's not enough to unnerve those multiplex viewers expecting a thriller starring J-Law, there's also a vaginal opening in the floorboards that oozes blood, while a beating heart seems to emanate from within the walls of the house, locating this bare, cavernous abode in the same spooky neighbourhood as The Overlook Hotel in The Shining or Hill House in Shirley Jackson's seminal novel The Haunting Of Hill House (and Robert Wise's terrifying 1963 adaptation The Haunting) or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak – dwellings possessed with an eerie life of their own.
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This literally ain’t the half of it, but it should give you some idea of the bravado of Aronofsky’s maximalist approach that his film can refer so directly to schlockbusters and old classics alike, often in the same shaky breath: There’s “The Innocents,” Poe‘s “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Rebecca” scattered throughout, but there’s also a good helping of “Pacific Heights” and “The Skeleton Key.”
You could say that Aronofsky is drawing on “The Shining” (the isolated setting and Bardem’s stony resentment) and also on “Rosemary’s Baby,” the greatest of all paranoid horror films.
Their home is like a cross between the Psycho house and Kubrick’s Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
And if that's not enough to unnerve those multiplex viewers expecting a thriller starring J-Law, there's also a vaginal opening in the floorboards that oozes blood, while a beating heart seems to emanate from within the walls of the house, locating this bare, cavernous abode in the same spooky neighbourhood as The Overlook Hotel in The Shining or Hill House in Shirley Jackson's seminal novel The Haunting Of Hill House (and Robert Wise's terrifying 1963 adaptation The Haunting) or Allerdale Hall in Crimson Peak – dwellings possessed with an eerie life of their own.
The closest analogues that come to mind are Jodorowsky’s earlier works, especially The Holy Mountain, but it’s going to take time and several viewings to figure out if that’s a worthy comparison – that it comes to mind at all speaks volumes, though.
Her partner, Javier Bardem’s ‘him’, is a slippery, elusive poet, while a malevolent Fellini comes to mind with the introduction of a louche band of characters led by Michelle Pfeiffer as ‘woman’ and Ed Harris as ‘man’, trailing with him memories of Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch.
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From the acclaimed director of Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream and Noah, Mother! is a mad, sprawling, wildly ambitious piece of work that is one long metaphor for … well, a whole bunch of things, including creativity, celebrity culture, religious mania, environmental degradation, the rise and fall of civilisation and, of course, motherhood.
Aesthetically resembling Black Swan more than any of the director’s other previous work, but with touches of Requiem for a Dream, this Paramount release could score solidly with the public on the basis of the genre elements and the star’s drawing power.
If “mother!” catches on in the same way Aronofsky’s “ Black Swan ” did—and I suspect it will—cinephiles and other factions will be arguing about it all through the fall, and beyond.
Not just another baroquely orchestrated big-screen freak-out in the vein of “Black Swan” (though it is very much that), the film touches on themes that — if too hazily figurative to be in any way autobiographical — at least tread on factors in the director’s own life.
There are shades of Ben Wheatley's take on High-Rise, echoes of Nicolas Winding Refn's queasy-beautiful The Neon Demon, a wodge of Lars von Trier and a few tonal call-backs to Aronofsky's own Black Swan.
Black Swan's Darren Aronofsky eclipses even his own darkest work with this surreal anti-romance for the ages.
Rosemary's Baby, Peter Jackson's early splatter movies, the demons and zombies of Italian grandmaster Lucio Fulci, Goya's hellish canvases, the midnight-black, surreal satires of Luis Bunuel, De Niro's kamikaze heating engineer in Terry Gilliam's dystopian sci-fi Brazil, Fellini's dizzying portrait of a tortured artist 8½ – all are stirred into the mad mix and more.