'Mother!' Clips: Jennifer Lawrence Makes A Shocking Discovery
Early buzz for Darren Aronofsky's horror thriller mother! has been largely positive since its Venice Film Festival debut earlier this week, even if many of the responses include a variation on "WTF?" along with their praise. Paramount has released some truly unsettling trailers for the Jennifer Lawrence/Javier Bardem vehicle so far, and now they're at it again with a couple of new mother! clips that add to the movie's turmoil bubbling just below the surface. Warning: there's a small plot reveal lurking late in one of these, so if you'd rather go into this film relatively cold, it's probably best to skip them altogether.
mother! clip
The marketing campaign has embraced all of the comparisons to Roman Polanski's paranoid thriller Rosemary's Baby from the very beginning, and this clip leans even further into that connection. "What do they want?" Lawrence's character (who isn't named in the movie itself) asks Bardem's character, wondering about their uninvited house guests. "They're waiting," he says.
"Waiting for what?" she trembles, and the terrible look on his face tells us almost everything we need to know. Lawrence's character looks down to see her unborn child poking her from the inside out. It's a particularly creepy, unnerving moment in a clip that's chock full of them. Is Lawrence's character slowly losing her mind, or is all of this stuff actually happening to her?
The second clip holds most of its craziness until the end, with the first half being a more traditional look at a scene from the film. When Ed Harris and Michelle Pfieffer's characters accidentally break something important to Bardem, he loses it and squeezes glass shards so hard that his hands start to bleed.
What is that thing, why does it have such special significance to him, and what other secrets does this film hold? I find it hard to believe the campaign for a movie like this would blatantly give away its biggest reveal in that first clip, so there has to be another unseen layer to all of this, right? Early reviews indicate that mother!'s third act transitions into full-blown chaos, but based on the director's previous comments, I think there's something huge we haven't seen yet:
"It's an intense journey and it's definitely the biggest roller coaster in the park. Only get on it if you really want to do the loop-the-loop."
Even the ecstatic text that pops up in the first clip – "You will never forget where you were the first time you saw mother!" – seems full of hype. Hopefully Aronofsky, a director who hasn't always been the most bankable but has never made a boring film, can deliver on those words.
A couple's relationship is tested when uninvited guests arrive at their home, disrupting their tranquil existence. From filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Black Swan, Requiem For A Dream), mother! stars Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer in this riveting psychological thriller about love, devotion and sacrifice.
mother! arrives in theaters on September 15, 2017.