The story of the film takes place in a country house where the poet played by Javier Bardem and his wife played by Jennifer Lawrence live a dull life. Until one day, when a mysterious doctor broke in with an inexplicable respect for the poet, the film's revelation of various problems officially began. As more and more interlopers come in, the progress of the plot becomes more and more bizarre, and finally goes out of control. The movie cuts through from Jennifer Lawrence's point of view, and runs through it. Therefore, it gave enough room for the big cousin to play in the performance. From the beginning of the calm transition to the later state of anger, the performance of a large emotional span can be regarded as relaxed. As the master of the house, Javier Bardem is deeply adored by the world for his authorship, and has a relatively complete interpretation of the state of blind obsession and excessive ego. The atmosphere is created very well, and I feel more about the combination of handheld use and weird sound effects. The combination of horror elements and horror is also Darren's usual trick.
The cinematographic aspect to be highlighted here is commendable for the presentation of the film's two very important mass intrusions. Since the whole view of the house was shot overhead in the first half of the film, the house appears extremely small in the overhead shot. But in the scene of large-scale indoor movement, the camera is firmly locked on the eldest cousin, bringing out the whole picture of the room from the perspective of the characters constantly moving, and infinitely magnifying a limited confined space with the influx of people. People of all colors, Asians, whites, and blacks gather together, very much like the United States today. Thus reaching the room is both a metaphor of American society. The background for the various attacks established later. From the perspective of performance and atmosphere, there is no problem with this film, but obviously the controversy of this film is not on these two points, but on whether the effect presented by the full screen of metaphorical symbols and a large number of surreal images is suitable and self-sufficient. Well, in my opinion, the sense of form is too much and too extreme, so that it overshadows the ambiguous content itself. Every character and line has become a symbol and symbol, but the meaning and explanation level represented by each person are different. Neither intruder is intertextual with the overall story, and all metaphorical symbols are fractured. It's tiring trying to sort out the fragmented surreal scenes one by one. If the formal presentation is to better express the content, then the metaphors carried by all the details of the film are greatly weakened with the out-of-control scenes in the second half. Attention jumps back and forth between individuals and group images. One after another, the deep-seated questions superimposed on the ideographic overwhelm the audience. This is also the biggest obstacle that this film brought me to watching. Horror, thriller, suspense, fantasy, the uncontrolled accumulation of various elements cannot be objectively described no matter which dimension is interpreted from. A large number of metaphorical symbols allude to multi-layered problems, making this film, which is originally a linear narrative, extremely complicated. Although it was predicted from the beginning that Darren, who is known for his stream of consciousness, might repeat his old tricks, he did not expect to do it so decisively. Darren, who completely gave up the genre film mode and only did self-expression, can be said to be courageous. It can also be said to push away everyone and immerse themselves in art alone and cannot extricate themselves.
Although the presentation of the film does not give me any sense of substitution (of course, I can see from the side that my acceptance of this type of film needs to be improved), it is still very interesting to calm down and think about the core issues of the film and the interpretation of symbols. What the film has as a distillable theme for a surreal story. First of all, there are some problems in the setting of male and female protagonists, such as the relationship between men and women in marriage, and the psychological changes that occur in women's subconscious during pregnancy. The male protagonist encountered a bottleneck in his creation and fell into the worship of others, unable to extricate himself, so ignoring the female protagonist eventually made the female protagonist suffer the pain of losing a child, and had to embark on the road of reincarnation chasing all these tragedies again. It's more like a story about how writers deal with the anxiety and balance brought about by dual identities. Women give too much, men take too much. The one who loves rejects the outside world and only loves one person, and the one who does not love ignores the other party and accepts everything from the outside world. The description of the relationship between the sexes is relatively the most unified, and it also conveys the emotion to the audience in a peculiar way of presentation. The next step is to interpret the political meaning. If the house is used as a carrier in the current American society, then these uninvited guests can be regarded as immigrants. (There are refugees in the second intrusion). There are many types of intruders in the whole film. Although an intrusion eventually broke up, it was mostly a potential conflict of values and did not cause substantial harm. The second intrusion will find that there are fewer and fewer white people. As the white left symbol gradually leaves the scene, there are more and more people of color. The incompatibility of the two cultures eventually intensifies into violence. The scene gradually got out of control, and the violent behavior of the riot police who suppressed the crowd led to the refugee problem. It eventually turned into a frenzy of killing. But interestingly, the descriptions of the white interlopers were mostly negative. But one of the little black brothers showed a certain demeanor in the conversation with the heroine. In terms of stance, the director obviously maintained a certain degree of neutrality, showing both the hypocrisy of the white-leftist trend and its contradictory side. Left-leaning in politics is in line with American political correctness. But the underlying metaphor seems to be asking, will the overcorrection brought about by political correctness be the trigger for another intensification of the race in the future?
At the end is the shocking religious passage, which is also the final climax. The congregation eats the heroine and the child, and the scene has changed from the cool tones of the previous riots to the weird warm tones brought by the sense of religious rituals. It shows the distorted fanaticism and loss of humanity of the believers. In the end, the heroine who lost everything ignited the fire of anger and burned everything.
I have to say that this film contains a lot of things, and it can be said that it is Darren's most ambitious experimental work to date. It can also be used as a cautionary fable for the future world. But the leaping span and fragmented massing of elements make the film largely unwatchable. It reminds me of the famous Korean director Bong Joon-ho's Snowpiercer, the same confined space, the same multi-layered innuendo. In the end, the same extreme out of control. Compared with Snowpiercer, this "Mother" is more extreme, and its expression is destined not to be accepted by the public. This is a forward-looking film or Darren's villainy. In terms of content, I agree with the first one, and it is obviously the latter in terms of expressiveness. It might be a good movie, but it's not a good movie. Darren never makes trade-offs and balances between the two. But this is Darren Aronofsky. A quirky black and white filmmaker.
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