Wow, am I NOT sorry! I fully believe this will go down as one of my top movies EVER. But what place exactly, I still don't know since I'm still mulling over its content and meaning. I mean its been almost 5 years since it came out so there's no shortage of critique, review, explanation and opinion about it so I read a few but I still come away with my own interpretation of it and it blows my mind.
First off, from all the hub-bub I read, I guess it either clicked with a viewer or didn't. Some reviewers, professional and amateur alike, hated it, others thought (like me) that it's a stroke of genius.
Since I hadn't heard a thing about the movie, was pretty sure I hadn't seen it (that's always a question considering if I watched it under-the-influence) and took it totally on face value, not even a trailer to go by, I watched it uninfluenced by any sort of inkling about what kind of movie it would be. I mean, it was labeled as "horror" and titled "mother!" so my first thought was, of course, Rosemary's Baby.
And as I watched, it seems each scene "in the beginning" (in hindsight a portentous phrasing) reinforced my assumption it was going to be a sort of resurrection of the Rosemary's Baby idea. I mean, husband is somewhat distracted/aloof, then old dude (Ed Harris) shows up suddenly and has "interesting stories" (like Roman Castavet) that captivate the husband enough to instantly befriend him and make him stay up all night ignoring wife. Then, old dude's wife (Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up and it's like she's an even pushier, crasser version of old Minnie Castavet (gloriously played by Ruth Gordon in RB). "Okay," I thought, "I could get into a rethinking of the Rosemary's Baby" theme." But then it gets more and more odd. Maybe they aren't part of a cabal, but maybe reality itself is suspicious in this movie. The adults sons of the intruding couple show up and a fight breaks out with one brother killing the other. "Oh wait a minute," it dawns on me "...and thinking back to a few minutes before when the weird couple smash the precious gem in the "forbidden" room! Now I get it!"
But despite the obvious, I was still reticent to dive into the thought that this film would be an allegorical truly-biblical recitation. There were already too many exceptions to the big Abrahamic faiths' specifics regarding the Old Testament to overlook. So I saw it as somewhat retelling stories of the bible and also portraying a unique relationship, especially when it concerns the relationship of the homeowner couple. Is Javier God and Jennifer Earth Mother? I think it's more complicated than that.
So many reviewers lost their shit over the baby killing and cannibalism part that I had to chuckle. I mean, the way this warped-up, acid-laced dreamscape of a movie was going, of course that was going to make it in there. I saw that coming a mile away. That and other depicted violence was visceral, but these whinners complaining about it would have really got bat shit crazy if a movie like this were shot by someone like Cronenberg!
Ultimately too, a movie that ramped up ratchet-notch by ratchet-notch higher and higher ever so steadily into the realm of the bonkers could have gone way over the top (as some think) but I think it kept it all well wrapped, even as to tie it with the bow, in the end, and give the whole story a repeating universes meets Groundhog Day ending (aka beginning, as in "in the beginning").
Perfection, Darren Aronofsky, simply perfection. Brava!