"mother!"

It is generally good policy to come into a film with as small an amount of prejudice as humanly possible, if only to let the mind experience it to the fullest extent of its faculties, without any pre-emptive formatting that the picture will more likely than not fail to conform to. Yet even with the best of intentions, it was impossible to ignore the warning signs surrounding Darren Aronofsky’s latest feature: Announced by its trailers as Luis Buñuel’s Exterminating Angel as seen through a post-Kubrickian prism of immaculately-framed death glares, oppressive string music and explosions of sex and blood straight out of The Shining, mother! premiered at the Venice International Film Festival with a Rosemary’s Baby-inspired poster and a gob-smackingly self-important “director’s statement” tying the film’s genesis to its creator’s concerns over global warming, overpopulation and the ongoing European migrant crisis. Everything about the film’s conception and advertising, from its non-capitalized title right down to its highly polarized critical reception (usually an encouraging sign in these groupthink days), appeared to form a gigantic hand spelling out the words “DANGER: AUTEURIST CLICHÉS DEAD AHEAD” in the blood of its cinematic ancestors.

The warnings proved mostly correct. Much like its protagonists’ house, mother! is built on a foundation of recycled metaphors that crash, burn and rise up from their own ashes to repeat themselves in an Ouroborosian cycle of self-destructive violence that’s both too well-practiced and too crude to hit its audience any deeper than their skin. Using familiar art-horror stock characters, settings and storytelling tropes, Aronofsky puts a magnifying glass on his own ego but all that we end up seeing is how much our echo-laden film culture have artificially enlarged it.

The aforementioned director’s statement would have you believe the story being told touches upon all sorts of Big Issues™ of our times but it’s really about one simple thing: Male artists’ toxic need for power and validation, and the pain they inflict on the women in their lives in pursuit of these things – not a subject often dwelt upon in artists’ biopics but one that any romantic partner of Caravaggio, Picasso, Cassavetes, Dalí, Gauguin or Fitzgerald would confirm to be inescapably true. Thus standing in for Aronofsky do we have Javier Bardem as an unnamed poet suffering from writer’s block (of course) and struggling to write his next magnum opus while his much younger wife (Jennifer Lawrence) busies herself with repainting and rebuilding their secluded old Southern house, which was recently rebuilt following a devastating fire. By the time uninvited guests Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer come in to stroke the poet’s ego and undermine his wife’s self-esteem, the main points about psychological domestic abuse, emotional vampirism and patriarchal pressure have all been clearly established via typically Aronofskian tracking close-ups and displays of not-so-subtly domineering microaggressions on Bardem’s part. All that follows is just a matter of playing coy games of misdirection with the audience.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with manipulating viewers’ expectations and playing with their feelings before taking them to the emotional destination they didn’t know they needed to reach; Hitchcock pioneered it into an art, De Palma updated it and Lynch and Fincher are currently its most consistently skilful cinematic practitioners. But every red herring, dead end and manhole must bring its corresponding share of relevant information, insight and emotion, without which they are little more than distractions. Here, they’re mainly excuses for Aronofsky to digress on his pre-established themes all while teasing potentially more interesting threads that end up connecting to his primary idea in the most calamitously literal way imaginable.

With the exceptions of The Fountain and The Wrestler, Darren Aronofsky’s plots are always energized by their protagonist’s declining mental health, usually in concordance with the single-minded pursuit of what they may or may not realize to be their own doom. In his best films – Pi, Black Swan and, by default, Noah – this is expressed by semi-subjective shots, narrative twists and editing tricks designed to make the audience question the character’s sanity and how much of what they are seeing and hearing is real or a product of their disturbed mind. mother! continues that trend by juxtaposing the family of fans’ gradual takeover of Lawrence’s property with disturbing sensory hallucinations hinting that the house may in fact be a living entity whose heart, diseased and blackened like Harris’s cancerous lungs, deteriorates in proportion to her mental state. In theory, it might make sense for Lawrence’s narrative reliability to be questioned, as much of the story’s emotional dynamics rely on a constant dissonance between her perception of other people’s behaviour and events and her husband’s, but that question is rendered moot by Aronofsky’s insistence on constructing his plot beats around self-evident symbols that scream out their meaning for all to hear. It’s a narrative language closer to that of fairy tales than psychological thrillers, and its resulting conflict with Aronofsky’s visual and kinetic languages cancels out any ambiguity over the veracity of Lawrence’s point of view.

Thus most of Lawrence and Bardem’s interactions with their Castevets-like visitors are tinged with psychological tension that never properly releases. They exist mainly to illustrate male artists’ dependency on people’s adoration and pain, as the poet welcomes their abrupt company against his wife’s protests and in spite – or perhaps because – of the many signs that their intents may not be as innocent as presented. The only guest to have any significant interaction with Lawrence is Michelle Pfeiffer’s snakelike upscale housewife, whose obsidian eyes are permanently drawn to our protagonist as if magnetically attracted to her slightest weakness. With sotto intonations, she pokes and prods at Lawrence’s archetypically female insecurities (fear of sexual inadequacy, fear of infertility, fear of unfulfilled social purpose) in the only scenes that successfully unify the story’s esoteric nature with its more human elements, briefly moving it in the realm of dark comedy.

Unfortunately, Aronofsky is too enamoured with his subject’s gravitas to consider moving there any further. When the intrusion of more external parties leads to lethal bloody violence, the scene’s intrinsically farcical nature practically begs for satirical expansion, but Aronofsky chooses instead to make it a narrative point from which to bring Lawrence closer to the climactic revelation and further toy with the audience’s collective mind. Even when the third act turns into a Pythonesque orgy of ripped-from-TV chaos, violence and gore, his need to make us gasp in shock and marvel at his own daring tears all the teeth out of his images.

From its horror-movie fake-out opening to its closed-loop ending, mother! plays like Aronofsky’s personal compilation of western auteur cinema’s worst tendencies. Using parts stripped from better, more original films as substitutes for meaning, it posits a false artistic self-critique that upholds rather than analyses his delusions of greatness. For all the horrific violence visited upon Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem’s wonderfully Cassavetes-like performance, with its dark mischief and the underlying danger buried beneath his squiggly face-consuming smile and devilish eyebrows (one of the more subtle Rosemary’s Baby references), the male artist’s God status is explicitly reaffirmed by the New Age symbols sledgehammered throughout the film: Man creates art, woman creates life, and God (re)creates woman.