VENICE FILM FESTIVAL

Venice Review: Darren Aronofsky’s Mother! Is a Spectacular Attack of a Movie

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition as overseen by Hieronymus Bosch.

by
GUY LODGE

SEPTEMBER 5, 2017 12:21 PM

There are angrily haunted walls, live organs in the toilet bowl, and floor cracks that turn into squidgy open wounds in Mother!, with a blazing inferno consuming the screen in the very first shot. But those might just be bloody, shuddery distractions: with apologies to Sartre, in Darren Aronofsky’s exhilarating, shape-shifting horror-not-horror movie, the real hell is other people. As lusty boos bounced off the walls of the Venice press screening theater while the credits rolled, I briefly felt much the same way. I wanted calm to absorb the pained, deranged provocation I’d just seen, not others’ loud, livid snap judgments; there’d been more than enough sound and fury in the preceding two hours.

I get the discord: Mother! is not a well-behaved movie. It does not obey the loosest expectations, even for an art-genre whatchamacallit by which we eagerly anticipate being freaked out. In terms of cinematic structure and discipline, it makes Black Swan look like an episode of Murder, She Wrote. Aronofsky compresses and splinters time with as much abandon as he stretches logic; the film’s story world turns as infinitely vast or as claustrophobically tiny as he needs it to be from one scene to the next. Aronofsky has cast his audience adrift like this before: 11 years ago, in the likewise contentiously Venice-premiered The Fountain, in which polite narrative and metaphysical rule sheets also gave way to persuasive, expressive surges of feeling.

Jennifer Lawrence

'mother!': Film Review | Venice 2017

Darren Aronofsky's latest stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as a married couple whose lives start unraveling when unexpected guests arrive at their home.

Writer-director Darren Aronofsky wants to have his commercial cake and chomp down on some vexing personal issues, too, in mother!, a very Rosemary’s Baby-like intimate horror tale that definitely grabs your attention and eventually soars well over the top to make the bold concluding statement that, for some creators, art is more important than life. How the film’s compelling star Jennifer Lawrence may feel about this sentiment is another matter, but this is a tale that, like any number of fanciful genre outings, both pulls you in with its intriguing central dramatic situation and pushes you out with some mightily far-fetched plot contrivances. Aesthetically resembling Black Swan more than any of the director’s other previous work, but with touches of Requiem for a Dream, this Paramount release could score solidly with the public on the basis of the genre elements and the star’s drawing power. It opens Sept. 15 after festival bows in Venice and Toronto.

Venice Film Review / Jennifer Lawrence in ‘mother!

Jennifer Lawrence

Venice Film Review: 
Jennifer Lawrence 
in ‘mother!’

Owen Gleiberman
SEPTEMBER 5, 2017 | 01:30AM PT

SCREENSHOT

Darren Aronofsky's head-trip horror movie, starring Jennifer Lawrence as a woman who slips down a rabbit hole of paranoia, is dazzling on the surface, but what lies beneath? Maybe nothing.

Pablo Escobar: a never-ending source of entertainment

The world’s most famous drug lord may be dead but his on-screen appeal is very much alive

English version by Heather Galloway

Pablo Escobar / Un asesino como icono de ficción

JESÚS RUIZ MANTILLA
4 SEP 2017 - 02:16 COT

Police photo of Pablo Escobar. EL ESPECTADOR DE COLOMBIA EL PAÍS

With the release of the third season of Narcos on September 1, former Colombian cartel king Pablo Escobar is dead, leaving behind a legacy of corpses, mourning families and millions of dirty dollars. At the end of the second season, he was killed in a shootout in the city of Medellín, but no matter. After a life of excess and crime, Escobar survives as an obscure and enduring legend in the parallel universe that is the entertainment industry, inspiring a long list of authors, movie-makers and show-runners.

Aside from the third season of Narcos – produced by Netflix – this month also sees the release of Loving Pablo, the new movie by Fernando León de Aranoa starring Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz.

Mother! / No gob left unsmacked in Jennifer Lawrence's anxiety dream of horror and dismay

Mother! review – no gob left unsmacked in Jennifer Lawrence's anxiety dream of horror and dismay

5/5stars

    

Lawrence and Javier Bardem play a husband and wife whose isolated house is invaded by another married couple in Darren Aronofsky’s black-comic nightmare

Festival de Venecia / Venecia pita a Aronofsky

I

t’s a powerful enough word at the best of times, but the exclamation mark gives it that edge of delirium and melodrama and despair – just the way Norman Bates yells it at the end of Psycho. Or maybe we’re supposed to hear a second, brutal two-syllable word immediately afterwards. Darren Aronofsky’s toweringly outrageous film leaves no gob unsmacked. It is an event-movie detonation, a phantasmagorical horror and black-comic nightmare that jams the narcosis needle right into your abdomen. Mother! escalates the anxiety and ups the ante of dismay with every scene, every act, every trimester, taking us in short order from WTF to WTAF to SWTAF and beyond.