WTF Is Going on With Darren Aronofsky’s 'mother!'? (2025)

It's been almost seven years since its release and Darren Aronofsky’s mother! is still one of the most divisive films in recent memory. Eschewing traditional narratives and characters is just the tip of the iceberg for the aesthetically aggressive movie that isn’t quite the psychological horror it’s billed as and certainly not in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby beyond featuring a stressed-out pregnant woman. But because mother! operates along the lines of dream logic and because the film is so steeped in symbolism and tone rather than character and plot, it can be a bit confusing, to say the least. The film invites conversation, and the best thing I can say about mother! is that it's the kind of film that will have you talking at length with your friends afterward, comparing theories and opinions. But if you’re still a little confused or just want another take to engage with, here’s mine.

Who Do the Characters in 'mother!' Represent?

mother! is an allegory about God and the Earth. Javier Bardem’s character, whom I’ll refer to as The Poet, is God, and Jennifer Lawrence’s character, whom I’ll refer to as The Mother, is Mother Earth, with the house standing in for the environment. From there, the story attempts to be a biblical allegory of both the Old and New Testament as well as a brief, deeply misanthropic view of human history.

Ed Harris’ man represents Adam. When he’s puking in the bathroom, we quickly see an injury right where his rib would be. In the next scene, his wife (Michelle Pfeiffer), representing Eve, shows up. They’re allowed to wander the house but are told specifically not to go into the poet’s office, but they do so anyway, and Eve accidentally breaks the fire crystal. They’re then exiled and soon begin having sex elsewhere in the house, thus representing original sin and man’s fall from grace after eating the forbidden fruit from the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden.

Aronofsky said in an interview with Time magazine that he was inspired by the children's book The Giving Tree, "It was. It’s such a strange book to be one of the most important children’s books in history. It’s a really, really tragic book. I can’t say it was consciously in my head. But very quickly afterward, I realized I had unconsciously tapped from it." He also noted other influences, saying that Luis Buñuel's French film The Exterminating Angel, gave him another way of looking at the very clear surrealistic and symbolic tone of mother!, "I was thinking about how to talk about global things in a human way. It’s very hard to understand the largest forest fire in history. It’s abstract to understand what that actually means. We see images but don’t absorb it. But everyone understands if someone comes over and burns a hole in your carpet with a cigarette. I tried to take global events and reduce them to a human scale." When you watch the movie, you can tell that Aronofsky has such a sweeping allegory in mind, and hearing how he could shrink it down into a cogent and viscerally powerful two-hour movie is fascinating.

Then the couple’s sons (Brian and Domhnall Gleeson) come along, arguing about their dying father’s will. In their argument, one brother kills the other (Cain and Abel). The parents and the poet carry the dead brother out of the house, and the surviving brother runs away. The poet and the parents then return later that night for a wake, and more and more guests come to grieve, but the wake then becomes a chaotic party where, after numerous protestations to not sit on an un-braced sink, the sink becomes unmoored from the wall and water pours into the house.

Thus, we have humanity’s downfall following the slaying of Abel and, eventually, the flood. After the water pours into the house and the guests leave, the mother admonishes the poet, saying that he won’t even have sex with her. They then proceed to have sex, and the following morning, she announces that she’s pregnant. He’s then struck with a flash of inspiration and goes downstairs naked to write. When he shows her the finished product, she sees a world-rejuvenated vision and says it’s beautiful. However, once again, people start flooding into their homes, and although she’s prepared a nice, quiet meal for her and the poet, the fully pregnant mother is overwhelmed by a throng of people. And these people are so nihilistic that they're almost frightening in the way that they have no empathy or understanding of the turmoil that Mother is going through in the film.

The process that The Mother goes through as her house is overrun and destroyed by this mass of sinful humanity took a real-life toll on Jennifer Lawrence. She spoke to Deadline.com about the stresses of playing Mother and the arduous process of making the film, “I never lose myself in a movie. This is the only time I’ve lost myself. I couldn’t tell my body that none of it was real. I kept on hyperventilating.” The emotional turmoil that you see in her character is an extension of the real psychological turmoil Lawrence was going through during the making of the movie. She continued to explain how mother! is a cautionary tale and warned against taking our planet for granted, "It speaks to the truth in humankind, the cannibalization and insatiable need and hunger that we have, and always have, and what will happen if we continue to rape and pillage the planet. If we continue to drill into the planet and put the emissions in the atmosphere, and the earth continues to warm, storms are going to get worse, droughts are going to get worse." Co-star Bardem was impressed with Lawrence's commitment to the role of Mother, calling her "Fearless...she is so committed and so professional. When you're working with someone so talented, you want to match that talent." High praise from one of the best actors in the business.

How Does 'mother!' Reference the New Testament?

At this point, the story is kind of leaving the biblical text behind and moving more into the historical record. The New Testament element is that the Mother’s child is a Christ figure. Still, before he’s born, the Mother goes through a hellish experience surrounded by war, human trafficking, and other nightmarish visuals before the Poet finally reappears and brings her to his private office where she can give birth to their son. The allegory here seems to be that God abandoned the Earth for stretches at a time before the messiah figure was born. Aronofsky and Lawrence wanted mother! to be a much broader and sweeping story than the obvious comparisons to Rosemary's Baby, saying, "The other tool that was most helpful to me was the house—my connection with the house, being barefoot, feeling grounded and home. Our references were more Biblical and universal than Rosemary’s Baby."

But then mankind screws it all up again and snatches away the baby, kills it, and eats its flesh as they worship at an altar to the Poet.They then assault the Mother, ripping at her clothes and beating her senseless before she’s finally able to escape, go down to the basement, smash open an oil drum, and set the entire place on fire. So even when presented with a totally innocent savior, mankind only kills, eats the flesh of the Messiah (i.e. communion), then proceeds to assault Mother Earth with God absent yet again, and Mother Earth finally uses oil (i.e. fossil fuels) to destroy herself along with humanity with God powerless to stop it, It echoes Lawrence's personal thoughts on the importance of addressing our real-world problems and the planet we often take for granted.

What Is 'mother!'s Message About the Environment?

The Poet then takes the mother’s charred body and takes out her beating heart with his hands. She turns to ash, and the burned heart becomes a new fire crystal. He places the new fire crystal in its holder, and we’re brought back to the beginning of the film where placing the fire crystal in the holder undoes the fire damage and a woman wakes up in their bed. The only thing that’s different this time is a different young woman wakes up in the bed. So basically, the end of the film suggests that the Earth and humanity will die and, at best, God will simply do everything all over again because he needs to create and desires love from his creations.

Additionally, throughout the film, the Mother will pause when getting overwhelmed, and touch the walls of the house where she’ll have a vision of a heart that’s slowing dying. The house continues to bleed, crack, and fall apart. This reinforces the notion that Mother Nature is seeing that the environment is dying, especially as more people enter the house and cause chaos. None of this is surprising when you consider that Aronofsky is an atheist, he’s staunchly environmental, and that humanity’s downfall in the face of an environmental catastrophe and an absent God was the theme of the director’s previous film, Noah. Aronofsky told Time that he wanted to do a home invasion movie with the home belonging to, "The mother of us all. The one who gave us all life. I wanted to tell a movie from Mother Nature’s point of view and talk about her love and her gifts and the way people ultimately cause her pain."

What Does 'mother!' Mean?

To be fair, not everything in the film is a one-to-one ratio, and not everything, especially in the second half, lines up with the biblical text or the entire course of human history. Does Ed Harris’s character as a doctor mean anything? Perhaps, but I’m not sure what. Why do all the war and chaos precede the birth of the messiah figure rather than follow it? Isn’t there war and chaos on both sides of the New Testament? Additionally, the God represented here isn’t the only view of a supreme being. Still, for Aronofsky, it’s how he views God — as a figure who is frequently absent when needed yet constantly feels the need both to create and to be loved despite the terrible behavior of mankind and the abuse they shower upon Mother Earth.

There are also loose ends that I can’t tie up or figure out if they even represent anything. I’m not sure what the yellow liquid the Mother keeps drinking represents. I don’t know why 911 answers the phone when the Mother calls (who does Mother Earth call in the event of an emergency?). But despite these lingering questions, I’m reasonably confident in my reading that the movie is about the relationship between God, Mother Earth, the environment, and humanity, with Aronofsky coming down on the side of humanity being a plague upon the Earth.

What Is 'mother!'s Point?

I’ve also heard a few other readings of the film, but I don’t think they account for the entire picture. One reading sees mother! as a story about creation, looking at the Poet as a stand-in for all artists and the double-edged sword about the need to create and the destruction that a work can wreak when it's released to the public. While I think Aronofsky certainly feels some kinship to his God figure in terms of an artist needing to create, this reading fails to account for the copious amounts of biblical symbolism, and, more importantly, fails to account for the Mother. Aronofsky was asked about this connection by Time: "I felt like I was empathizing most with Jen’s character, but I can see why they would think that. I make movies, he’s a writer — there’s clearly a connection about the male ego. But I’m connected to every character."

Another reading of the film sees this as a semi-autobiographical take for both Aronofsky and Lawrence, who used to be in a relationship. First, Pfeiffer’s character comments that the Poet is a little old for the Mother. Aronofsky was 48, and Lawrence was 27 at the time of filming. There’s also the kinship mentioned above between Aronofsky and the God figure, the frustration of being worshipped by fans, and the fear they create with their constant devotion. Then, when the Mother is attacked and her clothes are ripped from her body, you can draw parallels to how Lawrence had nude photos of her stolen and leaked online. Not long after mother! came out, Lawrence was one of 30 celebrities who had their nude images leaked on the internet from Apple iCloud. Lawrence said it felt like she had been "gangbanged by the fucking planet...There's not one person in the world who is not capable of seeing these intimate photos of me. You can just be at a barbecue, and somebody can just pull them up on their phone. That was a really impossible thing to process,"

In the eight years since mother! was released in theaters, there have been a handful of new and different interpretations of what it really means. No one debates the environmental symbolism that both Aronofsky and Lawrence have spoken about at length. The consensus of many of the viewers who have seen the movie more recently is that on top of the Mother Earth allegories, there is a definite effort on Aronofsky's part to draw parallels between the behavior of the people that storm the house and the insatiable materialism and gluttony of society. Almost presciently, Aronofsky directed a movie that has become obsessed with consumerism and social media that glorifies very pagan ideas of a nihilistic and Godless culture. As mentioned before, the film is heavily influenced by Aronofsky's atheist views, and the treatment of the cannibalistic destruction of the messianic "Christ" baby in the film only reaffirms the director's views on Christian religion.

mother! is available to rent on Amazon in the U.S.

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