← Back to Reviews
 
_______________________

MovieMeditation's

Reviews
_______________________

2017
mother!
directed by Darren Aronofsky


one word
Revelation.



one sentence
Darren Aronofsky's ‘mother!’ is a chaotic yet crystal-clear vision, which pushes the limits of creativity, movie production and not least the audience's own limits and thereby creates a movie experience that is so much its own that you can help but be spellbound by it.

one paragraph
The film is best experienced as a stimulating and thought provoking piece of mind trickery, which puts the mind and soul on overtime, inside a film that strongly reflects the sparkling auteur, who Darren Aronofsky once again proves he definitely is. He challenges the movie medium itself, and its “fixed-frame workspace”, and creates a nightmarish reality, where visuals, sound and acting is unhinged and untouched... a devilish fabled dreamscape, serving as an expanded apocalyptic anecdote, all about being in the midst of the moment, inside all the chaos, while struggling to get a firm grip on Aronofsky's uncontrollable sparkle of light in subjective cinema...

_______________________


additional paragraph(s) for the avid follower
Director, Darren Aronosky, resurrects himself from the ashes with a glowing and puzzling production, made in secret behind the backs of both the audience and the press. With the art piece, 'Mother!', Aronofsky takes us back to the beginning, where the director’s distinctive authority once again receives the right to tear down Hollywood's huge, enclosed walls in order to resurface, but without pressure from studies or high expectations from the audience.

Aronofsky plays around with cinematic elements like that consists of satirical, biblical and biographical pieces and then tosses everything into a blender, which then tears it all apart before the eyes of the audience, in the most crazy and sophisticated production I have seen in a long time – a completely insane and psychotic "split personality" of a movie production, made with so much energy and effort from the director, that the absence of straight forward logic and refined explanations doesn’t matter one bit.

Darren Aronofsky's ‘mother!’ is a divine, two-hour-long trip through hell - completely without hesitation - where your brain is constantly challenged by a cascade of uncontrollable contrasts and concepts that appear faster than you are able to digest it. I would like to think that there is a storyline present, but it is stretched out far above the heads of the audience, where Aronofsky continues to hang even heavier metaphors and stronger symbolism, which eventually threatens to break and fall to the ground – but the excitement of whether it does or not is exhilarating enough on its own.

The movie is exactly as flawed as it is flawless, if it makes sense, and this is precisely what gives the film a almost demanded energy, which I happily accept with open arms – even though Aronofsky cuts both my arms off in the process and prevents me from getting close to his latest, most fragile and most extreme work to date...

Also, the performances are top notch and almost delivered with what seems to be no effort from the cast. They are naturals, acting as natural and honest as possible, selling this movie with Hollywood actors as anything but a Hollywood movie. But it is definitely a movie, that will have people wander out from the theater… but it will also leave some people in awe… and also some people in confusion. It will split the audiences and critics in an extreme way, but that is exactly what makes this so great… A mainstream movie aims to please a wide audience, but fails to center in on something truly perfect; all the while a more artistically driven movie aims to please itself first, which means the audience that it does hit, it will hit dead center. And Aronofsky did for me here…



Question
In which way can artful movies be better than mainstream, as well as the other way around? Can it be a good thing, when a film kind of loses you towards the end, simply because it is such a subjective work and dares where others don't?

_______________________
first-time watch