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This is a SPOILER REVIEW.

Writer/director Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream) makes a claustrophobic allegory of the Bible’s story of creation, the fall from grace, all the way up through the birth of Jesus and beyond. He does it with Javier Bardem playing God and Jennifer Lawrence playing a hybrid of Mother Earth and the Virgin Mary (or women/mothers in general?) They live together in an old, big house in the middle of nowhere and are seemingly happy at first. But then Adam appears (played by Ed Harris). He smokes and is sick, and God is inclined to take care of him, even though Mother is clearly nervous about the mess, bother, and pollution he brings into her home. We see he’s had a rib removed, and pretty soon Eve is begotten (played by Michelle Pfeiffer). Eve is a real bitch to Mother, even going so far as to go into God’s private writing den and touch his prized shiny object. Then God gets mad and seals the writing den shut. Then Adam and Eve’s sons show up and Cain kills Abel… is all this sounding cloyingly obvious to you yet?

The first two-thirds of Mother! were a bit tedious for me. You know very early on who all the characters are. You see Javier Bardem using magical powers to create from ashes the house, Jennifer Lawrence’s character, and the world around them. Then we’re shown several times how Jennifer and the house are one being. When she’s sick, the house gets sick. Her heartbeat is heard throughout the house, in its walls and everywhere. By the time Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer show up, everyone in the audience should know they are watching the book of Genesis. If they don’t, then they are going to have nothing else to enjoy about this movie. And that’s my biggest problem with it.

Great allegory works on multiple levels. I think you should be able to enjoy an allegory at face value, and hopefully find deeper meaning in exploring it on a more symbolic level. But Mother! isn’t like other allegories. It doesn’t work at face value — or at least not very well. Without a strict allegorical interpretation of the movie, the characters actions and motivations become puzzling and maddening. There’s also far too much supernatural goings-ons to even entertain a face-value reading of the film. It’s a complete and total allegory. It’s allegory porn.

Where the first two-thirds of the movie are like watching Richard Dreyfuss make Devil’s Tower out of mashed potatoes for 90 minutes, the movie finally gets interesting and provocative in its last half hour. It’s still a ponderous allegory with all the subtlety of a hammer to the face, but I was intrigued about how far it would go and what it might suggest. Why is Aronofsky forcing us to consider the Bible, Christianity, and religion? To that end, I very much appreciated the movie’s indictment of Christianity. Aronofsky’s God character is a self-obsessessed, brute narcissist (just like in The Bible!), and the real horror of Mother! comes in shining the floodlights on how Christianity oppresses and abuses women, still to this day. I just wish this important message was delivered in a less clunky, less maturbatory fashion.