Ed Harris plays a man who claims to be a new orthopaedic surgeon at the local hospital he thought their house was a B&B – huh? – but could he stay the night anyway? Instantly affable and even exuberant, the great author says sure, and to his young wife’s silent astonishment starts chatting raucously with this stranger, drinking whisky with him, letting him smoke in the house. Yet their emotional stagnancy is shaken up by the appearance of a strange visitor knocking at the door late one night. Because they have no children and that is a problem. Their lives together, so seemingly perfect, are barren in terms of literature and biology. And yet Jennifer is doomed to be a kind of B-list Sofia Tolstoy, harassed by her husband’s creepy acolytes whom he indulges. He is a celebrated popular author and poet whose work has touched people deeply – a kind of solemn Paulo Coelho figure who is now however wrestling with writer’s block, unable to get his desperately sensitive words down with an old-fashioned fountain pen on what looks like parchment. This is her domestic passion-project activity pursued in a submissive spirit while her famous older-man husband gets on with his agonised vocation: trying and failing to write. Lawrence has evidently taken on the task of design and decor. Lawrence and Bardem play a married couple, never named, who live in a colossal house in the middle of nowhere: an octagonal folly belonging to his family which has had to be extensively rebuilt after an awful fire. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem are tremendously operatic as the leads and it is great to welcome Michelle Pfeiffer back to the big screen in a pleasingly cruel supporting role. The opening act gives us a view of a human heart being flushed down the lavatory - as good an image as any for the film’s mysterious, hallucinatory callousness. But it is as deadpan comedy that this film can be understood: a macabre spectacle of revulsion, a veritable agape of chaos. It’s a very bad dream of very bad things: influenced perhaps by Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby or Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel and I suspect that Aronofsky has fallen under the spell of the dark master of offensive mischief himself, Lars Von Trier and his horror film Antichrist. Mother! escalates the anxiety and ups the ante of dismay with every scene, every act, every trimester, taking us in short order from WTF to WTAF to SWTAF and beyond.
It is an event-movie detonation, a phantasmagorical horror and black-comic nightmare that jams the narcosis needle right into your abdomen. Darren Aronofsky’s toweringly outrageous film leaves no gob unsmacked.
Or maybe we’re supposed to hear a second, brutal two-syllable word immediately afterwards. I t’s a powerful enough word at the best of times, but the exclamation mark gives it that edge of delirium and melodrama and despair – just the way Norman Bates yells it at the end of Psycho.
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