One of the most talked about movies so far this year. Not because it’s really good or really bad, but because it’s both to some people. It’s one of those weird movies that has received extreme views from the audience.
Frankly, at first I wanted to see this movie just for J-Law because damn is she just perfect. But as the story developed, the mysteries behind really kept me on the edge of the seats. Days after, I kept thinking about it and what it is trying to say about the state of the world, and here’s my take on Mother! (Spoiler Alert!)
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Mother! is a biblical allegory that ultimately dives into the relationship with God, Mother Earth, and humans. Javier Bardem’s character, The Poet, is God. Jennifer Lawrence’s “mother” character, along with the house that she deeply cares about, represent Mother Earth.
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As more and more "guests" come and visit the house, Mother becomes increasingly frustrated and furious about them, while The Poet wants them to stay and begs Mother to forgive them, even though they are demolishing the house and killing their newborn child. In the end, Mother cannot take it anymore and burn everything down into ashes with the oil tank in the house.
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The guests are the humans in the world - self-centered, greedy, and treating earth as if it’s their own; using up all of earth’s precious resources and ultimately destroying it slowly day by day. In Mother Earth’s perspective, of course she doesn’t like it, because she feels like humans just come in without her permission and start treating the place as their own.
On the other hand, The Poet is absolutely fine with the guests, which is a metaphor of what God cares about – the people and humanity overall, that we need to love them all no matter what and be forgiving for what they do.
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The movie attempts to depict this conflicting relationship between God and Earth and how it’s doomed to fail, because they have completely different values. In the end, the world is in an infinite loop where everything is destroyed and created again. As the last scenes suggests, The Poet takes Mother's heart and it turns into a crystal that transforms the ashes back to the beginning, except this time it's a different woman as the Mother, and everything just happens again and again. In my opinion, this sequence can also relate to the Big Bang Theory. Maybe it is not the start of the universe, but a re-start of it.
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Here’s some of the biblical allegories and metaphors that I found:
The first Man and Woman who come to the house are Adam and Eve. The movie shows us that the Man has an injury in his body where the ribs should be and then the Woman shows up. Eve is created with the one of Adam’s ribs.
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The Man and Woman are welcomed to wander everywhere around the house except for The Poet’s writing room, but the woman insists. She subsequently breaks The Poet’s crystal and The Poet demands her to leave the room. This represents Eve trying the forbidden fruit and getting expelled from the Garden of Eden.
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The brothers’ argument that results in a fight and one of them getting killed. They are Adam and Eve’s sons with Cain murdering Abel.
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People breaking the pipe and causing the flood in the house, which is obviously a metaphor for The Flood.
The Poet survives, well and unharmed, after the fire; represents that he is God.
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Scenes where a heart shows up when J-Law touches the wall of the house and her heart is taken for a new crystal. The heart of the wall “blackens” when more and more people flood into the house, meaning people are destroying earth. Heart is an anagram for earth, so this suggests J-Law is Mother Earth.
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