Darren Aronofsky’s horror about a house that fills with uninvited guests is tightly controlled for an hour, and Michelle Pfeiffer is the worst of them. Then the allegory takes over, the volume goes up, and the second half is mostly spent explaining the first.
Darren Aronofsky has made a horror film about a woman who cannot get anyone to leave her house. Jennifer Lawrence, credited only as Mother, has spent months rebuilding a burned-out house in the middle of a meadow for her husband, a poet credited as Him (Javier Bardem), who has not written a line since they moved in. A stranger knocks. The husband lets him stay. For an hour this is as tight a piece of dread as Aronofsky has made, and then the film decides it would rather be a parable and stops trusting us.
Philip Messina’s house is the best thing in it. It stands alone in long grass with no road leading to it, and inside it is never finished: wet plaster on the landing, a hole where a wall should be, a lavatory that backs up with something that is not water. Matthew Libatique shoots nearly the whole film from a foot behind or in front of Lawrence’s head, handheld and grainy, following her up the stairs and round the corners, so that we never see a room before she does. Jóhann Jóhannsson is credited with the music and there is almost none of it. The film runs on floorboards, the doorbell and something ticking behind the walls, and the quiet does more work than a score would have.
The guests make the first hour. Ed Harris arrives coughing, says he took the place for a bed and breakfast, and is smoking in the study by the end of the evening. Michelle Pfeiffer follows the next morning in dark glasses, finds the drinks, and asks Lawrence why she has not had children and whether the marriage is any good in bed. Pfeiffer plays her with a smile that never moves and a voice pitched just under rudeness, and every scene she is in improves. Danny Glicker puts her in clinging black and Lawrence in thin pale cotton. We laughed at Pfeiffer, and then stopped laughing, at about the point their sons (Domhnall Gleeson and Brian Gleeson) turned up shouting about a will.
We were frightened for a good hour, and we do not say that often. Nothing supernatural has happened; a woman is standing in her own kitchen while people she did not invite open her drawers and her husband tells her to be nicer. The third time the doorbell rang we felt the whole row stiffen. Lawrence does this with almost nothing: a set jaw, a hand flat on the wall, the same request to leave repeated more politely each time. It is a performance made of restraint, and the second half asks her to scream instead. She does that well too, but it is a smaller thing to watch.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that the house fills up. Aronofsky, who also wrote it, has a meaning in mind, and from about the seventieth minute he is illustrating that meaning, scene by scene, instead of telling the story. Andrew Weisblum’s cutting, patient for an hour, goes to fragments. Things happen because the parable requires them to, not because anyone in that house would do them. Bardem, warm and vague and faintly pleased with himself throughout, dwindles into a mouthpiece. The scenes are staged with skill. They are also a checklist, and by the last half hour we had stopped being frightened and were ticking off the references, which is not what fear feels like.
This is Aronofsky’s pattern. Black Swan (2010) kept its metaphor inside a dancer’s body and was terrifying because of it. Noah (2014) started with an idea and built a flood around it. This film begins as the first kind and ends as the second, and you can see the join.
It runs 121 minutes and carries an 18, which the last act earns. See it for Pfeiffer, for the house, and for the hour in which nothing has happened and everything is wrong. Bring someone who does not mind being told what a film means, because this one will tell you, and then tell you again in case you missed it.
