On September 15, the highly anticipated horror movie mother! hit theaters all across America. The movie stars household name Jennifer Lawrence, alongside Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Javier Bardham. However, horror is not quite the right descriptor for this movie. Is it creepy? Yes. Disturbing? Definitely. But mother! will not allow itself to be put into a box. The movie is set around a couple living in their house in the country, when strangers begin showing up, and everything goes downhill from there. It is thought to be one huge metaphor, taking on huge world issues like violence and the treatment of women, all the while referencing biblical themes.

 Mother! is a mismatched jumble of ideas. Theories about the meaning of the movie include references to the Bible, setting the visitors equivalent to Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel, and the couple equivalent to God and Mother Earth. The mission of mother! is daring and bold; it is trying to take a wide range of important topics and condense them down into a two hour movie. Unfortunately, the overwhelming amount of information trying to shove its way into this movie proved to be too much for it. Instead of shining a light on the world’s issues, mother! tries to force the topics down into an often confusing metaphor that leaves its viewers wondering what they just witnessed. The last section of the movie in particular is one gigantic mess, as the house is overrun by masses of people who  begin killing one another, pillaging, and even becoming cannibals. The chaos portrayed in this scene does not showcase the problems within our society, but rather it conveys a struggle for a writer and director to properly express their thoughts in a coherent way.

 Critics and viewers alike have highly contrasting viewpoints on mother!, as neither can completely agree upon whether the movie is pure genius or pure lunacy. Many audience members were turned off of the movie simply because of its frankly disturbing plot twists. Viewers going to the movie in expectation of a more mainstream Jennifer Lawrence-esque experience were horrified to instead find gruesome violence that could arguably be crossing the line of too much (they killed a newborn baby and ate it, for God’s sake). Senior Juliana Martinez said, “The movie was just too much. I came out of it genuinely confused about what I had just watched for the past two hours.” In all honesty, this movie had the potential to be amazing, but it ultimately lost its vision while trying to cram all of the information into it. Hopefully, the next Jennifer Lawrence movie, Red Sparrow, will make up for the fantastic mess of this one.