‘Mother!’ on Hulu and Prime Video: A Movie That More Than Earns Its Exclamation Point

All this week Decider is celebrating the most polarizing punctuation in pop culture: the exclamation point! More spirited than a period and more decisive than a question mark, the exclamation point is as divisive as it is volatile. Invigorating sentences with enthusiasm and gusto since the 15th century, this renegade maverick of grammatical anarchy has irrevocably disrupted the status quo of the punctuation game. Love it or hate it, Decider commemorates the imitable mischief-maker known as the exclamation point.

One of the most polarizing movies of 2017, mother! is now available to stream for free on both Hulu and Prime Video. The movie is … an experience. Written and directed by Darren Aronofsky, who’s put his characters through appalling physical and mental trauma in movies like Pi, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, and Black Swan, mother! features Jennifer Lawrence as the wife of a poet and author (Javier Bardem), faithfully making a home for the two of them at their isolated country house. A house that, for all that we ever see of the pastoral grasses and trees in the distance, might be the only place for miles. The couple have been considering children, but something’s been holding them back; for the moment, Lawrence’s character busies herself tending to the home, painting and improving it.

Into this big, roomy, idyllic home, people begin to arrive. First it’s a man (Ed Harris), followed by his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer). They’re appreciative but ride. Harris makes himself at home way too quickly, smoking cigarettes inside, while Pfeiffer appears to amuse herself by asking Lawrence too-personal questions about her marriage and why she doesn’t (or does) want to have kids. They’re soon joined by their kids, a pair of squabbling adult sons. Nobody seems to have a bit of respect for either the home they’re now squatting in nor their hosts. And worse, the Bardem character doesn’t seem to have much of a problem with it.

If you haven’t seen mother! yet and think you want to, here’s when I say go to Hulu, go to Prime, and watch it now, and be as thrilled, scared, angry, frustrated, enlightened as you want to be. Then come back and read the rest, having just taken in a truly unsullied movie experience. Congrats.

Things get worse in mother! More people show up, tempers flare, people die, people mourn, time passes, a baby is born, more people show up, things seem better, things get worse, unbraced sinks get sat on with absolutely no regard for their structural instability. But at the core of this story — which at times feels like anything from a fable to a parable to a Twilight Zone short to a surrealistic psychological thriller — is a woman whose home and space and privacy are constantly being encroached upon, and whose husband keeps gaslighting her that nothing is wrong.

mother! is two kinds of movies at once. It’s foremost an unbearably tense movie about the panic-inducing hell that is other people. Lawrence’s character is steadily and increasingly threatened by an invasion from outside her walls, only it’s not zombies or demons but people. Well-meaning people. People who are fans of her husband. But at its most elemental, it’s a story about panic and a woman who’s losing control of her own space.

The second kind of movie mother! is depends on the eye of the beholder. This isn’t a story about people, exactly. Everybody’s behavior is too arch; their words chosen too carefully. It takes the viewer about 15 minutes to realize they’re watching something symbolic or allegorical. Aronofsky has said that the allegory is an environmental one: Lawrence and her home represent mother earth; Bardem’s character is God, welcoming in humankind — starting with Adam (Harris) and Eve (Pfeiffer) and their sons who do violence to one  another — and accepting their endless stream of praise even as they inconsiderately tear up his home. By the end of the movie, the home (Earth) is destroyed and beyond repair. People scoffed at the environmental allegory Aronofsky pushed, mostly because they had ideas of their own that were juicier and more fun to write about, but watching mother! as a horror film for a tortured and dying planet, there’s a furor that feels fitting.

Most critics, however, preferred to view mother! as a more salacious but, frankly, typical allegory about an artist and his creative process. Here, Bardem’s character is still god, but he’s a god of poetics and literature and filmmaking. He’s inattentive, preening, and weak, and ultimately the home around him burns to the ground. But by the end, he survives and is able to birth another perfect diamond, then start over with a newer, younger wife. It’s not a particularly flattering portrait of an artist, but many critics took the film to be Aronofsky’s insincere apology for being a bad and inattentive husband who allowed the chaos of his creative process destroy his wife and his marriage (I really hope Rachel Weisz managed to get out of this without being asked about it) and then eagerly did the same again and again on movie after movie. Aronofsky, who was rumored to have had an affair with Natalie Portman around Black Swan and was dating Lawrence while filming mother!, was ripe for such an interpretation as an asshole auteur.

What’s far more interesting to me than whether Aronofsky wrote an allegory about a nightmare artist on purpose is if he wrote one by accident. The allegories in mother! — biblical and environmental and Freudian alike — are so obvious and upfront that it would feel like a real stretch to imagine Aronofsky is being dishonest when he says environmental allegory was his explicit intent. Why make a film so blatant and then not only back off but outright lie for the press tour? But what’s fascinating in that in drawing an allegory about a beleaguered planet and her indifferent/vainglorious god-husband is that Aronofsky wrote the god-husband as an artist, and in doing so, may have drawn an accidental self-portrait about the worst qualities of an auteur. I don’t think that makes Aronofsky a good guy or a bad guy, and a lot of the discourse around mother! might’ve been pitched more calmly if people were less concerned about what mother proved about the director’s goodness or badness.

In its final 25 minutes, when the house is at its most chaotic and Lawrence is most threatened, something terrible happens that you almost never see in movies. Not American, studio-produced movies, certainly. It’s something so terrible that anybody who might’ve been on the fence with the movie at that point. If you’re already fully bought into the film not as a narrative of characters but as a pageant of Biblical horror, the terrible thing isn’t even a shock; it’s an inevitability. It’s honestly one of the great Rorschach tests in recent cinema. Either Darren Aronofsky just did the New Testament like it’s never been done, or he just [redacted] a [redacted] for no other reason than to pile harm upon his protagonist.

mother! was never not going to be polarizing. It’s also not a movie to be watched casually, so if you’re settling in for an evening of Hulu, fully commit to it. Just know that the sink is not braced, and it never will be.

Stream mother! on Hulu

Stream mother! on Prime Video