The “Mother!” Honest Trailer is here to remind you that the movie is actually about a faulty sink
As anyone who’s seen it can attest, Mother! is…a lot to unpack. The psychological horror story, written and directed by Darren Aronofsky and starring Jennifer Lawrence, came out in September and almost immediately, audiences had FEELINGS about it. Was it a biblical allegory? (Yes). Was it a commentary on humanity’s relationship with nature? (Yes). Was it pretty messed up when — warning, this is grotesque — a bunch of randos ate a baby? (YES). Naturally, that strong reaction four months ago led to Mother! joining in on the time-honored tradition of polarizing movies: getting the Honest Trailer treatment.
Quick recap if you haven’t actually seen Mother!: Jennifer Lawrence (mother) and Javier Bardem (Him) are fixing up their old rural house and trying to overcome writer’s block, respectively, when two ominous visitors arrive (Michelle Pfeiffer as woman, and Ed Harris as woman’s husband, yep, you guessed it, man). Long story short, man and woman break Him’s special crystal and a bunch more strangers show up and get ROWDY (and by “rowdy,” we mean violent, murderous, and terrifying). Of course, Screen Junkies’ interpretation dives much deeper into the movie’s bizarre details.
First of all, the trailer takes viewers to task for being surprised by Mother!‘s overall weirdness considering Aronofsky’s track record.
He’s the same guy who made Black Swan and Requiem for a Dream after all, and fair point. The rest of the video mainly focuses on the vagueness of the rest of the movie, from that mysterious crystal to the point where everything goes “cuckoo, bananas, nutso, cray.” It also rightly draws attention to J. Law’s preoccupation with the busted sink.
“Stroke your chins for what’s either a retelling of the Bible from nature’s perspective, an allegory about global warming, a meditation on the creative process, a critique about traditional gender roles, or a story about how hard it is to date a famous person in this film that refuses to answer basic questions about plot or character,” a narrator says.
As usual, the parody series’ take on the movie is pretty harsh, but then so were the reviews when Mother! came out. In fact, Lawrence told Oprah in a Hollywood Reporter interview published last month that reading the negative feedback about the movie online “just broke [her] heart.” (She was extra bummed about Mother!‘s frosty reception, she said, because she was dating Aronofsky at the time.)
All in all, the Honest Trailers’ take does a pretty good job of summing up a one-of-a-kind movie, though we think they missed an opportunity by not even mentioning the movie’s lowercase title (maybe that’s just a writer’s frustration?). Watch for yourself above and see what you think.
