You're just in love with how much I love you

Mother! (2017)

Chosen by me as I like going to the cinema a lot though this one took some psyching up to go to.

There is perhaps a key to unlocking what Mother!'s symbolism and plot means. Clearly there is a lot of biblical nonsense going on and at the end it gets very on the nose with relating itself to the pain of the creative process so despite it's what-the-fuckery Mother! is fairly straightforward. In allegorical terms at least - to get there you still have to go along with it's odd (brilliant) pacing, swerves into blackly comic territory and an apocalyptic ending that feels like a Kim Newman novel where society does not need all that much of a push to descend into a bacchanalian frenzy of violence, sex, worship and cannibalism.  And throughout Lawrence is astonishingly good, in almost every frame of the movie she anchors the film's excesses with a deeply committed and emotional performance. Her character may not react the way someone in real life would but you are carried through the film by her anyway.

However what I really want to talk about is what the film meant to me.

We are shaped by the things in our immediate perception. My Nan liked to have the cocktail Snowball. So now forever ingrained in my mind is that a Snowball (which I still don't really know what it is) is an old ladies drink. Even though I've only seen one old lady drink it. We define reality by experience but forget the bias of that experience.

Currently I have been thinking a lot about my mental health. I am often a deeply unhappy and anxious person. I have within the last week sought out therapy for those issues. 

So when I say Mother! is actually all about anxiety I'm aware that it's just something that my bias would be pushing right now.

But Mother! has relayed (and triggered) my anxiety like nothing else.

I'm can't recall if I've talked on these pages about how two people talking next to a road causes me to physically tense up. The screen controls what you can see and without periphery vision (and because of the huge amount of an annoying trope) I'm convinced the people will get hit by a car. Even if it's a charming romance comedy. 

Mother! uses this control of the frame brilliantly, constantly in tight fixed position on Lawrence, the stress comes from never quite knowing what is outside the frame and is deeply unsettling. 

During the film she becomes more and more agitated by people around her. Losing control of the space, not understanding why people won't just listen to her, do the sensible thing. She craves that control, and even when, ostensibly, others are just trying to help, she can't take it, needs them to just let her do it. Every new person that turns up frustrates her more.

And she can't understand why they all like her husband, ignore her, want a physical piece of her work (the house, her child) but make her super uncomfortable.

So yeah, Mother! was super easy for me to understand. 

It's a remarkable, powerful movie, whose ending might be a bit too much but it's more art film than horror story, more a slice of mind than parable. Amazing.