Deborah Ross

Nut job

<p class="p1">His latest, a psychological horror thriller, doesn't hold back – and it doesn't much make sense either</p>

issue 16 September 2017

The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a general rule, what happens in a fever dream should stay in the fever dream, as the content will be plainly nuts. This is plainly nuts. This is even plainly nuts with an exclamation mark. Plainly nuts! However, it’s never plainly dull, so it does have that going for it. I think.

Described as a psychological horror thriller, the set-up has a poet and his younger wife living in a magnificent, isolated house in the countryside that she is doing up. She is Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and he is Him (Javier Bardem). She is in thrall to Him, and exists only to serve Him, while he is suffering from writer’s block and is distant. She just needs to make everything perfect; just needs to create some kind of paradise — an Eden? — and he’ll soon be writing again, she imagines.

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