10 Horror Movies That Totally Confused You
5. Mother!
The difficulty with mother! is that you would struggle to find an idea you can’t fit into the film’s metaphor-laden plot, and so choosing what is the exact right way to interpret it is very hard.
If you go in blind, it takes a little while to realise quite how insane the film is, and by the time you realise you’re also confronted with the fact that you have no idea what’s going on. Well get comfy because that’s not gonna change!
Commonly thought to be one big allegorical story, the plot jumps around and takes drastic shifts in tone, all from the comfort of our protagonists’ home. A married couple reside in a grand, secluded house; the husband is a writer and the wife a gentle home-body type. After they welcome some strangers into their home, things all start going downhill.
This one-location schtick doesn't help simplify things, in fact it only serves to make us ask more questions, starting with “why has the house now become a desert war-zone?”, and “why are they carrying that baby toward an altar?”
Keeping track of everything unfurling is no easy feat, and any viewer is prone to certain periods of confusion. It is definitely a piece of art, it’s just that not all of us have our brains wired to decipher that stuff.