What Does The Ending Of mother! Really Mean?

5. mother! And Feminism

There's a rich seam of feminist defiance (or the dream of it) in mother! that has prompted talk of it being a feminist picture (even if it ultimately defers to a nightmare of claustrophobic patriarchy).

As Jennifer Lawrence says:

"To me, this is incredibly feminist in the way that these Victorian, patriarchal novels show these loving, amazing husbands that are very slowly and delicately taking away their wives’ dignity... To be a feminist movie, we don’t have to all be women and all be aggressive. Before we knew what feminism was, people were writing these novels that showed women’s strength being drained from them.”

Mother spends most of the film watching in despair as things happen to her and her voice is ignored until she's eventually even stripped of the one thing that was wholly hers (decorating the house, which was her statement of individuality). It's only at that point that she takes on the role of the mother, as if it's an enforced deferred role that she only sees as a "good" idea when everything else is taken away from her.

And even then, the child too ends up being taken away from her, leading to her final statement of defiance - murdering the child's killers and destroying herself and the house. That's her feminist strike against Him (a name as reflective of patriarchy as it is of a God), and the true horror of the ending is that she is ultimately doomed to simply relive the same issues, despite that act of defiance.