mother!

I am not one to give you spoilers, so don’t read this review if you do not want a little hint as to what this movie is about.  That said, I can guarantee that you will be totally confused without this hint.  I went to this movie without knowing that the whole thing was an allegory.   Knowing this upfront would have helped me get at least a little grasp of what was going on. I thought from the trailers that I would be seeing a kind of updated Rosemary’s Baby. I think the trailers were misleading. Ready?  Here it is, your hint….the movie is an allegory for Mother Earth and the first book of The Bible.  Each character, outside of Mother herself, represents a character in the Bible.  I could readily discern Mother Earth, God, Jesus, Adam, Eve, Cain and Able.  There are probably a lot more, but those are the ones I figured out.  Even knowing this, “Mother” is bewildering.  The cinematography is great, but that just isn’t enough.  Jennifer Lawrence is very subdued as a newlywed who is married to a writer.  They live in a gigantic, creepy house in the middle of nowhere.  Ed Harris and Michelle Pfieffer are spooky as a couple who appear out of nowhere and are inexplicably invited by Jennifer’s husband, Javier Bardem, to stay with them.  Things only get weirder, as more and more odd things happen, and crowds of people arrive in increasingly complex scenarios .  By the end of the movie, it seems as if the whole of humanity is living, loving and fighting in that house.  Will you like this movie?  I really don’t think many people will like it.  It is a brutal roller coaster of perplexing  allegories and people doing things that just don’t make any sense.  I am not giving it a rotten apple only because the performances are excellent, and I love Ed Harris and Javier Bardem.  But I think you will be happy to have missed this one.