10 Horror Movies Nobody Understands

Darren Aronofsky always intended this weird allegorical fable to be a film that required unpacking and unpicking, and he's certainly succeeded.

mother! hits you hard and doesn't let up: in fact, it escalates, as the creeping dread gradually shifts into amorphous horror. Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem play an unnamed married couple with a codependent muse/poet relationship, but that's the full extent of their characterisation.

Unlike most horror, mother! isn't a film about bad things happening to good people, or even necessarily to people at all. Instead, we’re presented with a surreal, grim headf*ck about archetypes clashing, the traditional cinematic narrative of good and bad choices - cause and effect - replaced by a recursive inevitability.

Is she Mother Nature? Is he some kind of Platonic demiurge? Possibly: but then Aronofsky maps a specifically Judeo-Christian pattern across that metaphysical, environmental reading, with the other 'characters' who intersect the couple's lives appearing to represent Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel.

It seems clear that Aronofsky has no intention of allowing his audience to get a grip on the film, presenting it as something to be experienced instead. Rather like modern art, you take away what you take away: mother! is a personal journey for each and every one of us.