Mother! Movie Review
Bad First Impressions of Mother!
Where do I begin with Mother!…? This was a movie I had originally intended to review as part of my Girls Night Out series on Youtube, but I found I left the theatre with shockingly little to say. In fact, I don’t think I have ever experienced a theatre so quiet after a movie has ended. Nobody in the audience knew how to react to watch we just watched.
As of this writing, it has been a week since I went to see Mother! at the theatre. After this time to reflect, I think I am finally able to revisit this movie, and give it a proper review.
If someone had asked me my opinion on the film immediately after leaving the theatre, I would have said that outright that I did not like the movie. I did not feel empathetic toward any of the characters, and I was not invested in the plot. By the time I’d sat through two hours of watching Jennifer Lawrence running around her house screaming at random strangers I didn’t much care about how the movie would end.
Second Looks
Looking back, I now know the disappointment I was feeling, in the characters and in the plot, was because Mother! was not the movie we had signed on to watch. The trailers released for Mother! were vastly different in tone and genre than the final product. We all walked into the theatre expecting a thriller, a home invasion movie, or maybe even a ghost story. What we ended up watching was so far removed from what we expected that it coloured our perception of the movie. It left us feeling cheated.
Don’t get me wrong, even a week later I still cannot say that I enjoyed this movie. I won’t be running to the store to pick up a copy in a few months, and I won’t recommend it to my horror-loving friends. However, I may give it another go if it ever shows up on Netflix. I think that, now that I am viewing it as a speculative arthouse film rather than a horror movie, I am much more forgiving of the movie.
Final Thoughts
The reasons I don’t care for Mother! now are different from when I left the theatre. I am no longer disappointed that it was not the movie I expected to watch. I am annoyed that what it turned out to be was a two hour long biblical allegory. Once I knew who the characters represented, what little suspense the film still held for me disappeared. The issue with this kind of story is that we all know the beats that the plot will hit, which takes the mystery out of the ending. By the end of the movie, Mother! does everything but hit its audience over the head with the book. The result is a movie which moves so jarringly from one scene to the next that I left the theatre with whiplash.
Additionally, I found I didn’t care one bit about any of the characters. I realize that they are not “real people” in the literal sense. They are not meant to act the way a normal person would act. Unfortunately, for me, they behaved so far outside any social norm that I felt frustrated by them more than anything else. I didn’t care if any of them lived or died because they were all awful people, which takes the sting out of the nihilistic ending.
Recommendations
Do I recommend Mother!? I will say straight out that this movie is not for everyone. There is a reason the consensus from audiences is negative. This is the type of movie that art critics will love to analyze, and audiences will love to tear apart.
I won’t say not to give this film a chance, I will just forewarn new viewers to know that Mother! is not for everyone. Mother! is style over substance. It is a surreal rollercoaster which will seem sluggish at the start and end in utter chaos. It is just a strange movie, plain and simple. If that is your bag, then go for it, but maybe wait until you can catch it on VOD.