REVIEW: MOTHER!

3/5

Mother's The Word.

121 Mins. Starring: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Domhnall Gleeson, Brian Gleeson, Jovan Adepo, Kristen Wiig & Michelle Pfeiffer. Director: Darren Aronofsky.

Mother f#@#$&! What the hell is this?! That's what half the movie-goers leaving the cinema half-way through 'Mother!' this weekend will scream. As the remaining film-fanatic half lean around them to not miss a thing in what will be the most divisive movie of this year. If not easily the most controversial one in recent decade making memory. To be loved and to be loathed this festival film received as many sneered mouth, hand-cupped boos in chorus to the auditorium heavens as it did hell for leather rounds of applause in upstanding ovations at Venice. Halloweenheads here it is. Prepare to be haunted as this is the season your hallowed harrowing genre comes from what lies beneath the monsters in your bed, rushing from your slammed bedrooms doors. The spine tingling and shattering freak show to end the Summer blockbuster season and pre-curse the Oscar fall one began with the return of Stephen King's 'IT' after 27 years in the form of your deepest, darkest fear, Pennywise. A clown scarier than the Big Mac one that asks if you'd like fries with that. And before the Goonie gang tikes on trikes of 'Stranger Things' stand by this to end a thriller of a Halloween binge night streaming and screaming like Michael Jackson, we have one truly terrifying tale that is anything but an 'It' following run up the stairs and pocket full of posies, all fall down sterotypical genre churning cliche. In a horrifying year that has seen the envelope of the scarlet letter feverishly, letter opener pushed so much this scare/shy film fan has started showing his face at more hide behind your date movies. From the "Shudder Island' Swiss-Alps, scare scenic retreat of Dane DeHaan's 'A Cure For Wellness', to the 'Get Out' of Jordan Peele's race relations ravaged, scathing metaphor of white privilege in the face of black power. And in this scary Trumped up time we all need a little bit of entertainment that says something, no matter how horrific it all is. And this movie metaphors all that is wrong with a man made world of ignorant discrimination and the abuse of power in love needs and wants. 'Requiem For A Dream' and 'Black Swan' director Darren Aronofsky and his new beau leading A-listed actress Jennifer Lawrence give us the maddening 'Mother' of all hard-hitting, shock factor movies right now with this requiem for a nightmare.

Shredding your every nerve to its very ending, this freak-show is as tearingly tense as the 'Swan' skin pulling from the tip of your nail to the end of your torn cuticle as skin crawlingly painfuly puncuated as that very stinging feeling. But just like fellow visionary gothic director Guillermo Del Toro's haunted manor born, blood-soaked, dressed up 'Crimson Peak' with Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain, this is no horror movie. No matter how hauntingly harrowing. Not really. This is more like a psychological terror that will scare the wits out of what you can't see, but will tirelessly and torturingly think about in every waking hour until you're over the edge. Can't have nightmare if you can't even get to sleep. Your wits end will meet the disgust you thought was already too desensitised to boot as the pulse of this house is haunted with more than what's hiding in your closet or what goes bump in the night. As 'The Wrestler' director grapples with bone bruising surrealism, as subtle as a "here's Johnny" axe ground through the bedroom door. Forget skeletons the bones of this film are wooden floorboard and dust rooted in the trappings of marred married life victim to inattention, stunted creativity and passion in both the workplace and the charred heart of where home really lies and that most feared and misery company hated mistress of love, loneliness. No stay at home DIY will paper over the cracks in this paint thin foundation of bruised heart and lost souls in a relationship as micro-managed manipulated as it is room with a view lost adrift at sea with no memory bliss. As Jennifer Lawrence's stay at home, do-good wife, caters to the needs of her tortured writer husband to the point of suffocating subservience that smothers every hope of a home life more than the furnished feel of meticulous, put together decoration as everything else falls apart. Whilst Javier Bardem's beta-bloked alpha-male who treats his so he says "muse" with passive dissmissiveness that hurts as much as outright abuse, albeit in different, darker shadowed smile hidden ways. As Aronofsky's anxious age simmering slow burner, to aggravated explosion of emotions and the senses is an evocation of existential dread in the forlorn form of another haunting on the outside 'Ghost Story' that carries so much more moral meaning inside to the burning heart of matters and the nature of the whole world and its wider waking implications invoked and implied here. The beating heart in the walls of this blood cracked and creaking floor-boarded house may seem soot black-rot and ash haunted, but in reality it's the love lost note message in bottled up emotion that is more telling than what the walls talk. The sound of silence more piercing than what you think you heard.

Lawrence breaking even more ground boxed into four walls simply shows just how amazing an actress she really is. The next Meryl Streep going from 'The Hunger Games' to the 'American Hustle' /'Silver Linings Playbook' of back-to-back, multiple Academy Award Oscar nods. Hey Jude! Jennifer is the new J-Law. And after the mystique of this actresses 'Joy', this heartbreaking homegown depression of personal purgatory may be her best and most powerful performance yet. Puncuating the poor excuse hidden abusive male figure themes of the perplexing 'Passengers' alongside Pratt, Chris to recharge almost a year later with this much more morality and questionable humanity driven exercise in examination of the human condition in a social mass media world of wall scaling and backbone crumbling desires to peer-group fit in for fear of sticking out like an individual one claims to believe they are. Lawrence's lovesick newlywed, loyal to the fault of others is victim to just how horrible people can be. Especially when they are party to effortless selfishness and superiority perceived favoritism. Yet still she stands as strong as the a-star act from the a-lister. Even in the face of one of the most expressive and shudder evoking actors of today, no matter how nice he really is or acts here. After playing a barnacle blistered, scaly scary undead villain in Johnny Depp's 'Pirates Of The Carribean-Salzar's Revenge' this Summer, this halloween Javier Bardem is a scary as the time he cattle gunned people to death with a Rolling Stone comb over in the Cohen's 'No Country For Old Men'. Or when he bleached Bond as the ultimate Daniel Craig era 007 villain in 'Skyfall'. But just more subtely so. It's a monster performance of manipulatingly convincing charm like when he looks to bolt back up Universal's 'Dark Universe' as Frankenstein's monster, but here alongside his beautiful bride, he's a different sort of beast. This disturbed home life is further invaded from privacy to decency by Ed Harris' stranger in the night. The legend and 'Westworld' man in black going deeper and darker into the phlem and bowels of his chain-smoking and spluttering character. The effects it has even touching his sibling warrings sons inheriting the sins in the form of real life brothers in arms Brian and Domhnall Gleeson, on realer than raw form as Brendan's boys batter each other into subplot submission. But no matter which famous face shows up at J-Law's door ('Fences' climbing and breakout star Jovan Adepo making his name under the roof of another residence. Whilst funnywoman gone serious Kristen Wiig being particularly and satirically, seriously good as a literary agent who is literally something else altogether), the only one who can come close to threatening the body of Jennifer's work here is the 'Dangerous Mind' of Law back in the 'Scarface' signature sealed day of a scene stealing Michelle Pfeiffer. The original Catwoman herself halfway there, purring with a sinister sexiness that claws at her younger, impressionable host at a blood drawing striking distance. The feline big eyes of this femme fatale offsetting an otherwise expressionless look that could kill of much more bitter, embedded emotion that lies beneath truth. There's so much going on here in Aronofsky's bleak look of bricks and mortar, home is where heartbreak is hallucinogenic. One that spellbinding and compellingly creaks and treads carefully until it runs through a house of strangers inading that stack up and then fall like playing cards of all sorts of faces and dealt hands as their greedingly grabbing mitts claw for a piece of everything. There are themes of God and Mother Earth, Adam and Eve and even Cain and Able here. But this forbidden fruit is also worm infested laced with licks at a Trump time of smartphone dumbed down social status. Not to mention mob-menatlity riots, mere-mortal whore worshiping individuals in our life like Christ like figures and celebrities wrote by our own hype like a game of Gods. Teaching us that these day after day numbing notions against the ideal of family and loyalty are in comparison pathetic, ignorant, outwardly ultimatly destructive. So much so that it's killing us and the future we thought we held so tight. Aswell as putting an exclamation point on the awareness of abusive relationships, malingned marriages, the evil men do and the callous oppression of women. These are just a few of the book club like theorised themes that turn throughout this taught twisting narrative that begins nuanced and then blights our senses with noose-strangling, nauseating imagery that turns a house party of uninvited guests into cults of religious fanatics, soldiers, terrorists and one in the all too familiar same. All to a climatic point following a perfect moment of eyes and expression made peace, to the other end of the spectrum opposite that no mother should suffer ever and in turn shows us just how harrowingly horrible masses of people and this movie we set out to see really can brutually and honestly unforgivably be. Aside from this intolerable cruelty the awe-inspiring Aronofsky milks 'Mother' for all our "seen it all before" eyes can take. But as we scream "GET OUT" like the message of the greatest meaning hidden horror of the year, this 'Mother' in J-Law will keep knocking at our door longer than this day. Goodnight...try to sleep tight. TIM DAVID HARVEY.

Further Filming: 'Black Swan', 'Rosemary's Baby', 'Winters Bone'.