Nut job

The film-maker Darren Aronofsky says he wrote Mother! in five days as if in a ‘fever dream’ and, as a general rule, what happens in a fever dream should stay in the fever dream, as the content will be plainly nuts. This is plainly nuts. This is even plainly nuts with an exclamation mark. Plainly nuts! However, it’s never plainly dull, so it does have that going for it. I think.

Described as a psychological horror thriller, the set-up has a poet and his younger wife living in a magnificent, isolated house in the countryside that she is doing up. She is Mother (Jennifer Lawrence) and he is Him (Javier Bardem). She is in thrall to Him, and exists only to serve Him, while he is suffering from writer’s block and is distant. She just needs to make everything perfect; just needs to create some kind of paradise — an Eden? — and he’ll soon be writing again, she imagines. Meanwhile, Him, we learn, previously lost everything in an inferno, which somehow managed to create his most prized possession, a thumping great crystal. Him may be one of those writers like Paulo Coelho, who say much that sounds profound yet means nothing when it comes down to it, and many will say similar about this film.

We are certainly discomfited from the off. Right at the beginning, we see Mother go up in flames, her skin bubbling and charring. But is that from the past or is it the future? Here, in the house, she drinks a strange yellow tincture and can feel a heart palpating from within the wall. (I’d have got on to the estate agents about that.) Our discomfort is increased when they receive a visitor, a doctor with a bad cough who says that he thought this was a B&B.