“I’m really sorry for what’s about to happen,” director Darren Aronofsky said before showing “Mother!” at a packed Toronto Film Festival theater on Saturday.
Calm down, “Black Swan” guy. Viewers will survive; some may see, as I did, scenes he intended to be terrifying as ridiculously over-the-top. But “Mother!” is undeniably a wild, memorable ride. It’s a Rorschach test of a movie to interpret however you like.
The film opens with a false sense of haunted-house familiarity, as Jennifer Lawrence’s character, “Mother,” renovates an old mansion while her husband, “Him” (Javier Bardem), wanders around grumbling about writer’s block. He’s got a strange crystal he keeps on a little pedestal; she feels a beating heart when she puts her hand on the dusty brick walls. You know, how things tend to go right before everything gets very supernatural.
Instead, there’s a knock on the door: Ed Harris is a stranger who’s come to the wrong address and ends up staying, at Bardem’s insistence. He’s soon joined by his wife (a brilliant Michelle Pfeiffer), whose existence he failed to mention earlier. Lawrence’s character is as confused as we are: Who are these people? Why is the poet letting them move in? What’s up with Pfeiffer’s character, who day-drinks, leaves the house a mess and razzes Lawrence about her unsexy underwear? And is that . . . a human ORGAN clogging the toilet?
Lawrence, ever the saintly housewife, cleans up after the guests, registering doubt and annoyance but ultimately accepting the chaos. The strangers leave, come back with more family in tow (including Brian and Domhnall Gleeson as feuding brothers), leave again; others show up to shower the poet with praise. She begs him to make them get out before they trash the place; he won’t. Oh, and a hole in the floor won’t stop bleeding.
There’s one incident so grotesque, it rivals anything the director did in “Requiem for a Dream” — squeamish viewers should proceed with caution. No need to give away the other horrors that follow — but what does it all mean? Spoilers ahead, though this is the rare film that benefits from having its intentions spelled out.
Aronofsky has said Lawrence’s character is THE mother — as in Mother Earth — and that the film was born out of “frustration and rage” at the state of the environment. He’s couched it in biblical metaphors, easy enough to pick up if you know in advance that they’re there. But it also reads as his self-deprecating portrait of what it’s like to be the partner of a narcissistic auteur. Ultimately, the vagueness of its creeping terror and dread become customizable to whatever freaks you out the most; watch for an encore presentation in your nightmares.