Darren Aronofsky is perhaps most renowned for the depth of his serious musings, as demonstrated by his body of work as writer-director. Projects ranging from 1998’s Pi, to 2014’s Noah – by way of Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain, and Black Swan – all bear the hallmarks of an artistic mind reaching for the light in an all-encompassing darkness. Such history is largely the reason for the intense anticipation that has now built around his upcoming feature film, Mother!
Aronofsky, his cast, and the producers are purposefully keeping the plot of this horror-mystery-thriller tightly under wraps – with only the slightest of clues having been included in the trailers released so far. We know that Jennifer Lawrence plays the lead, and that Javier Bardem plays her husband. We know that Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer show up at their door one night, and we know that things take terrifying turns from there. But that’s about it.
For his part, Aronofsky has been discussing the film with Entertainment Weekly and now has confirmed that the marital relationship between the characters played by Lawrence and Bardem is indeed the crux of the issue.
“You can see the tension in their relationship as it’s pulled by all these forces. Jen and Javier are experiencing things in different ways.”
This in itself sounds exactly like a Darren Aronofsky movie, but when the writer-director explains the process that resulted in the script, we begin to see that Mother! is actually going to be something quite different.
“I was always jealous of singer-songwriters who can pop out a song in a couple of days or a few hours. I had this idea, and I felt it rise up in my head. I took a long weekend and got into this fever dream and just pumped it out. [Laughs] We’ll see what the results are. It’s been an interesting way to approach it — trying to capture a single emotion and trying to tell that two hour story out of that emotion.”
The filmmaker is known for taking extended periods of time to complete his screenplays, so for this one to have been “pumped out” over a weekend-long “fever dream” is intriguing, to say the least. Add to that the idea the fact that the Black Swan director has essentially tried to build a narrative plot around a single, intense emotion, and we have a potential cinematic masterpiece on our hands – albeit a terrifying and uncomfortable one.
Mother! is released in cinemas on September 15th.
