Critic Reviews

mother! is something truly magnificent, the kind of visceral trash-arthouse experience that comes along very rarely, means as much or as little as you decide it does, and spits you out into the daylight dazzled, queasy, delirious, and knock-kneed as a newborn calf.

Darren Aronofsky’s churning fever dream mother! is a devouring and restless experience: a creative surge that’s like the lancing of a boil, releasing a torrent of despair and disgust for the greedy chaos of society today as well as a self-loathing portrait of the artist as an emotional succubus.

A sick joke, an urgent warning and a roar into the abyss, Mother! earns its exclamation mark three times over and more.

Yes, it is pretentious. But pretension is also about ambition and this is cinema that is willing to kick out the lights.

As horror it is ridiculous, as comedy it is startling and hilarious, and as a machine for freaking you out it is a thing of wonder.

This one’s a crucible of sweaty pre-natal panic, weird knocks at the door, mind games and ultimately, a roaring, miniature apocalypse set inside a single claustrophobic living room. If that already sounds like your home, it's time to go and give it a try.

For its combination of ambition and audacity, this is a glorious piece of cinematic insanity.

It’s an absolutely crazed fever dream of a film, and like a febrile infant it begins with a few odd notes and barely heard, often off-camera sounds, and then proceeds to build those seemingly minor instances of weird until it crescendos into an ear-piercing, panic-inducing visual and aural shriek.

The movie is a savage attack on the egomania that enables a director to fancy himself a deity, as well as the rotten patriarchies that govern the worlds of art, industry and religion alike, with Lawrence embodying the wise but perpetually ignored voice of the divine feminine.

Mother! is an unparalleled achievement, entirely unprecedented and unexpected in this era of studio filmmaking.