Mother!

Just got back from a tech screening at the theater I work at.

Two thirds of this movie are cute. Standard Hollywood Horror shit, creaky old house, husband with secrets, untrustworthy strangers waiting to jumpscare you by resting in weird places, it's well made silly stuff.

Then the third act happens.

Aronofsky must be snorting some of the highest-quality cocaine Los Angeles has to offer, because the third act of this movie could NOT have been done by anyone who was sane or sober. It is an allegory for something, and I couldn't for the fucking life of me tell you what.

Please, if anyone's seen it, lemme know what you think.

Proof I've seen it, for those who have:
KRISTEN WIIG DUAL-WIELDING SHOTGUNS

lmao It almost was kino. Shit just went too nuts. I've been excited to see this since it was announced but it kind of became a mess.
>It is an allegory for something, and I couldn't for the fucking life of me tell you what.
^literally the whole theater at the end of my screening.

It's a pretty obvious God/Christ allegory with a pinch of eternal recurrence thrown in. I'm not sure exactly what the war scenes were for apart from maybe the dangers of religion maybe? What did Javier say at the end when Jlaw asked him who he was? I am the light/life? Couldn't understand him.

Tell me the plot please.

Alot of shit happens to jlaw and continues until the end

Plot? Plot has no fucking meaning here. This is barely even a movie.

Scratch that, this is two-thirds of a good, mostly creepy Rosemary's Baby ripoff movie and one third of a coked-up philosophy professor and an English professor explaining the symbolism of Rosemary's Baby and the entirety of The Bible at the same time.

I thought he said "I am I".

Hm ok that works. Tangentially, I thought the credits were interesting, how all the characters were named I mean.

Yeah, I noticed they never actually named any of the characters in the movie.

A group of dickish neighbors come to harass a put-upon housewife while her husband Anton Chigurh doesn't give half a shit and is pretty much oblivious to what's happening. This includes a subplot where the Man in Black and an elderly Catwoman fuck inside their house and General Hux murders his brother, which leads them to have a funeral with a bunch of uninvited guests that give Katniss a hard time as more of them show up.

Throughout the movie, we see scenes where our heroine, Mother, is reaching out to her home itself and is seeing that it's slowly dying (as reflected by a decaying, beating heart), something that's reflected by the actual structural damage going on, along with scenes where the house actually bleeds. So after having enough shit to deal with, Mother tells her houseguests to fuck off - which they do - and then convinces her husband (Him) to sleep with her.

The following morning, she realizes that she's pregnant. This discovery leads to her husband finally getting inspiration to complete his masterwork as the pregnancy moves on at a fast rate and he sells all copies of his book.

And then it all goes downhill, because then the guests return. And then they start some kind of cult of personality dedicated to Him while ransacking the house, the police show up and start riots inside the house, and Mother gives birth to her child. The cult then accidentally snaps the child's neck while passing the baby (who is pissing everywhere) around, they hold a funeral and they start eating the baby in some faux-Catholic ritual. Mother, evidently having enough of this shit, blows up the home only for Him to take her heart out of her still-living body which magically repairs the house and creates a new wife for Him, most likely setting the chain of events that started the plot back in motion.

The end.

Continued...

As the OP says, the movie starts off alright as an eerie dark comedy and then it goes completely bugfuck insane into a realm of pretentiousness. And it's not the good kind of insane pretentiousness, either, which is what's so disappointing about the movie. Aronofsky could have shown his standard portrayal of a downward spiral in his protagonists in a much more coherent and meaningful way than he did with this movie.

After my screening ended, I could tell that at least half the theater hated the movie and that those who didn't really weren't sure what to make of it - it's an arthouse horror movie and should have been advertised as such, as I'm sure word-of-mouth could have been better for it if they chose not to make it look like a conventional horror movie (which it isn't, and I think that's why the audience I saw it with really didn't like it). It's not a movie like Black Swan, which is able to handle its horror elements in such a way that it's accessible to all audiences while still being artistic in expression.

But with all that said... I don't regret watching it. I can't consciously recommend this movie to anyone, though, which is a big reason why it pisses me off that Paramount tried to market this as a conventional horror movie when it isn't one at all. This is the kind of movie that would make David Lynch go "Okay, you fucking lost me."

Oh man this sounds fucking hilarious the way you explained it, especially:

>The cult then accidentally snaps the child's neck while passing the baby (who is pissing everywhere)

topkek

so is it worth seeing in theaters? like an 8/10? it looked very good from the trailer.

OP here. I dug the pretentious faggotry of it all desu. It's like a shotgun blast of college-level philosophy to the face, and people are gonna be lost as fuck.

The previous movie we had in there was a wonderful small movie called Columbus (which I kinda have to like seeing as I'm a Hoosier). A lot of people walked out of tht saying "It's got nothing going on, it's so pretentious" which I didn't get, it's a movie about architecture so of course it'll be a lot about pretty buildings. What did you expect, a fucking action comedy?

They're gonna go into this expecting a standard horror, like the advertising said. They'll go in for creepy spooky noises and violin stings that ruin jump scares, for screeching every time someone puts their hand on someone's shoulder unexpectedly. Then they're gonna get...THAT.

We're gonna get so many fucking refunds for this movie and it's gonna be hilarious.

Is that a real poster? Did they really rip off the poster for Rosemary's Baby that blatantly?

It's fucking terrifying, especially since you get like 10 minutes of JLaw nursing the baby while Anton Chigurgh just stares at her...menacingly.

Then it gets to JLaw going full Doom Guy on the house guests. It's beautifully absurd.

Nowhere near as good as the trailer made it look, but if you like weird allegorical stuff, there's a chance you'll get something out of it.

It's kind of like What Lies Beneath meets Rosemary's Baby and then in the last third of production everyone snorted cocaine and ate peyote and tried to act out an aristocrats joke.

And sadly, the insanity that unfolds at the end is not nearly as interesting a viewing experience as I made it sound. The first two thirds were alright, though.

On another note, I somehow missed the part that OP was talking about where Kristen Wiig dual-wields shotguns, but I'm almost tempted to give the movie another watch just so I can see that.

It's real, and a very obvious homage.

Sounds like my kinda movie

It was the execution scene, where the publisher has like 6 people on the floor and walks in a line blowing their heads off two at a time.

Ah, right! That was it. Thanks.

I couldn't recognize her in this movie so that probably had a lot to do with it.

It honestly sounds exactly like the kind of over the top pretentious garbage I've come to expect of everything Aronofsky does.

He's literally a fedora core teenager trying desperately to make important movies, and he wants every scene to be THE MOST IMPORTANT SCENE EVER FILMED.

At least they're always technically amazing.

I just wish he'd film other people's scripts. The Wrestler was fucking fantastic.

The trailer for Columbus ensures I will never watch it. God it looks dull.

Mother sounds as awful as Black Swan or The Fountain, but I can't say I was bored by them.

It's dull as shit but I love smaller movies like that. Little introspective pieces about people finding their way in life and out of small towns. Paterson was great in this regard.

And yeah, "Boring" isn't a word used to describe this fuckin' thing.