Mother!

Crazy people--You can't live with them...and that's our show. Thanks for coming! It's generally common courtesy to keep ones nightmares to oneself; in this case, it might have been nice if Aronofsky had done so. No doubt those playing along at home could spend hours trying to assign one referent or another to this film's mega-metaphor, but I feel little compulsion to do so myself. What I do note is the fact that the viewer is really given precious little reason to care about these people, from the get go. Thus, all that happens seems, no matter how consequential from a plot standpoint, distant and unmoving. Of course, given that these characters are less characters and more archetypes, that's to be expected. But from a filmmaking viewpoint--and particularly a film viewing viewpoint--archetypes represent stuff on an intellectual level; they don't particularly engage people at the emotional level required for a full cinematic experience. So we wind up with something closer to an experiment in discourse rather than an actual story. And, alas, people tend to watch movies for the story. That makes this flick, ultimately, a success only within remarkably narrow confines, and otherwise a failure. A noble failure, perhaps, but a misfire nonetheless.