Mother (2017)

Mother may be my favorite comedy of the year. It’s essentially the haunted house and characters of Shirley Jackson and the kitchen sink emotional violence of Sam Shepherd whipped together into an over-the-top mix of creation and toxicity. There’s a lot here, from relationship problems to haunted houses to Michelle Pfieffer being awesome to a scary frog. It’s goofy fun.




Sure, there's a lot of stuff in here about creation myths and religious rituals and Christian & Hebrew Scriptures, from human sacrifice to hosts to weird worshipping, then rolling over into cyclical stuff about art as a form of creation, but that's just on a really interesting and darkly funny story of toxic masculinity as the husband (Javier Bardem) treats his wife (Jennifer Lawrence) as more of a glorified groupie than as a wife.  Then the old house they live in, that Lawrence supposedly restored after a fire some years before, starts bleeding and creaking and weird doors show up and we're off to the races.  (By the way, subtlety is overrated a lot of the time, and this movie has no truck with such a thing. You can take your pick as to what a particular bloody opening is meant to to be representing and hey, all of them might be right.  But I know what my choice is.)

In this little paradise of husband and wife, living alone in a house in a field, one night stumbles Ed Harris, coughing and swearing and generally being a nuisance as a guy with his own motives who just happened to pass by.  Then his wife, played by best part of the movie Michelle Pfeiffer, appears, there's more drama starting with her snide remarks and insinuations and very strong lemonade, more people appear and then more and the house becomes a party, and one of the single best parts of the movie is how Jennifer Lawrence plays her growing WTF? with all of these...people appearing in her house and disrupting her life.

I'm not going to say any more about the actual plot, but this is a must-see.  It's very black comedy at it's best, and if you're not into that it is having a lot of fun with horror and drama conventions that you'll enjoy as well.  It's Aranofsky in bizarre comedy mode, like Requiem For A Dream, and that's almost never a bad thing.

★★★★

2017 - Written and directed by Darren Aranofsky