Review: Darren Aronofsky's "Mother!"
This review contains spoilers. We saw Darren Aronofsky's 2017 Mother! yesterday, with Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Ed Harris. This movie was incredibly divisive with some audiences loving it and some loathing it. After viewing it, I'm definitely in the "loving" category. The film is an unapologetic religious allegory, with only minimal effort made to connect it to the realist cinema we now take for granted. As was the case with The Last Temptation of Christ some years ago, I can imagine that some believers may find the movie moving and some will find it offensive. It may also baffle people who are not familiar with religious stories, or who miss some of the allegory. The picture is mythological and not theological, drawing on mostly on Abrahamic traditions with some Greek, Hindu, and Buddhist themes as well. I expect that some of the audiences who hated it weren't prepared for the hard-to-categorize form of this fil