The first full trailer for Darren Aronofsky’s anticipated mother!, is out, and it reveals a Rosemary’s Baby type narrative, drawing on the horrors of intimacy, wherein a husband and wife lovingly make a domestic paradise together, while in the meantime, the husband has secretly been inviting evil into it through the presence of falsely innocuous strangers. They show up, then begin to overtake the life the non-colluding spouse thought was perfect, plunging her into their hellish rituals. Rosemary’s Baby turned out to be one of the best horror movie/psychological thriller/things of the 20th century, so it’s clearly a good setup: and mother! — or at least mother!’s trailer — looks like it uses it quite well, to very horrific ends.
The film stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem as the central couple, and Michelle Pfeiffer and Ed Harris as two strangers who show up. “They’ve come here to see me,” says Bardem, with creepily calm glee, later in the trailer, after we’ve already seen Pfeiffer and Harris engaging in foreplay that’s somehow evilly sexy, eerie old photos of Bardem stored in their luggage, the house suddenly teeming with strangers, and a lightbulb oozing blood. So yeah, “they’ve come to see me” can’t mean anything good for Lawrence’s character, or her husband’s motives. And then shit starts to get really scary — though we don’t really know what, per se, is creating all the scariness. (The skittering score, by Arrival composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, does just as much work as the visuals, which are actually pretty vague in the trailer.)
Watch:
mother! is out September 18.