10 Recent Underrated Movies That Deserve A Second Chance

Mother! was an incredibly weird film, and certainly was never going to receive universal acclaim because it was so clearly written to be divisive. With a marketing campaign that struggled to settle on an audience though, it ended up not really finding one, and that’s a huge shame.

Directed by Darren Aronofski, the movie was only slightly stranger than his previous hits Black Swan and Requiem For A Dream, though that proved to be the tipping point. Mother made a small profit, grossing $44 million from a $30 million budget, well short of Black Swan’s gross of $329 million.

The movie is a biblical allegory, with Jennifer Lawrence as a metaphorical stand in for Mother Earth and Javier Bardem as God. It gets quite convoluted at times, but all the major set pieces from the Old Testament are there in some way or another.

The whole point of metaphor though is subtlety. This was lost in the trailer, which, not wanting to show its hand, seemed to cast Lawrence and Bardem as mismatched lovers in a sex cult. The name didn’t help clear up confusion in that regard.

For all its weirdness though, Mother! is worth giving a go.