TORONTO — “Doesn’t this look like where people come to get fired?”
Jennifer Lawrence was in a bland hotel conference room here, waiting for Darren Aronofsky, the writer-director of her new drama, “Mother!
” It was a few hours before the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival. Mr. Aronofsky, her boyfriend, was running late.“Where is he? I’ll call him,” she said and spoke into her phone: “Call ‘the Dark Lord.’ ”
She was kidding (probably), and just as typically unfiltered about the experience of making “Mother!”
“I really freaked out before this one,” she said. “I thought I’d been miscast.” Her starring role, as the unnamed “mother,” an earthy wife who doesn’t even leave the house, was a departure from the flinty, adventurous heroines that she is known for. “I’ve never felt so insecure,” she said.
What changed?
“Nothing,” Ms. Lawrence said jokingly. “We wrapped the movie, and I’ve been sweating bullets ever since.”
The dark lord materialized moments later. It’s not an ill-fitting nickname, at least cinematically. On screen Mr. Aronofsky has conjured up all manner of ghoulish misbehavior and grotesqueries in “Requiem for a Dream” and “Black Swan.” “Mother!,” an ambitious parable hidden in a horror flick, tops them easily. What starts as a home invasion-psychological thriller ends in flaming nightmare surrealism, stuffed with themes that divided, and mystified, critics.
“‘Mother!’ will likely be 2017’s most hated movie,” declared the Verge, while others called it “brilliant” and “an unparalleled achievement.” “It’s a hoot!” A.O. Scott wrote in The New York Times.
With a reported $30 million budget and an artistic sensibility usually reserved for the indie crowd, it’s a wild gamble as a major release for its studio, Paramount, especially on the heels of “It,” Warner Bros.’s more traditional, and decipherable, horror blockbuster. Even with the benefit of two Oscar winners in a usually surefire genre, and the frisson of a romance between the director and the leading lady, “Mother!” underperformed its modest box office estimates after opening Sept. 15. But if it alienates mass audiences, it could also be the slow-burn conversation piece of the year, with high-profile defenders including
On the surface, it’s about a couple, Ms. Lawrence and Javier Bardem, in a rambling, secluded Victorian house. He’s a poet, with one major hit but troubled by writer’s block; she is renovating their home, forever tidying up. Their placid life is dismantled by hordes of uninvited guests who won’t leave. All the symbolism — packed like a Russian nesting doll, with religious iconography, celebrity culture and military-industrial-state overtones — is in service of one grander idea, the allegory that moved Mr. Aronofsky to write the script in an uncharacteristically prolific five-day stretch. “I just pounded through it, kind of like a fever dream,” he said.
But the allegory seems to have eluded many viewers, and Mr. Aronofsky and Ms. Lawrence disagreed about how much to reveal. “He wants people to go in blind,” she said, which she felt was a shame. “You’re going to miss all of the detail and all of the brilliance behind the whole movie,” she said. “My advice is to understand the allegory.”
Mr. Aronofsky favored an unsuspecting audience, the better to enable interpretations, or astonish. But, he said, looking at his girlfriend across the conference table, “She can do whatever she wants. She’s a genius marketer and clearly doesn’t need any career advice from anyone, and knows how to sell a movie.”
Ms. Lawrence: “Are you being sarcastic?”
He wasn’t, and so, let’s follow her lead. Thematic spoilers ahead, but rest assured that even if you absorb them, the movie will throw curveballs. “Mother!” is about Mother Earth (Ms. Lawrence) and God (Mr. Bardem), whose poetic hit has the weight of the Old Testament: hence all the visitors clamoring for a piece of Him, as his character is called. The house represents our planet. (Walking the wooden floorboards in bare feet is what finally got the part to click, Ms. Lawrence said.) The movie is about climate change, and humanity’s role in environmental destruction.
The action takes place on the biblical sixth day (the film’s original title was “Day Six,” she said) and follows that timeline. “You have the creation of people, you have the creation of religion itself, people reading the same writing and arguing over its meaning, false idols,” Ms. Lawrence said. She got the religious references immediately. “I was a…
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