Darren Aronofsky’s baroque monster of a film has already inspired a wave of interpretations. The overt metaphors, the Bible-grade allegories everyone can now recognize at a glance, and that infamous final act make it very tempting to put the film under the microscope again and again.
Classic tools of film analysis certainly “fit” the narrative. You can map the allegories, assign each character a religious or mythological stand-in, and feel clever. Yet something remains. The discomfort, the sense of lack doesn’t go away.
It’s the kind of discomfort that feels like owning an extremely delicate diamond, perched awkwardly on two thin columns at the far end of the room. One wrong move, and it’s gone. It’s the kind of lack that feels like having something precious torn out of your arms in the time it takes to blink.
When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, his liberalism was never only about the marketplace. It also smuggled into economics the fresh ideas of a “new Atlantis”, straight out of Francis Bacon’s utopian island. “Let them do, let them pass”—the famous laissez-faire—promised freedom to the market, but also privacy to the individual.
Under this ideal, the individual could bring goods to the market without answering to anyone—not even a king—and face consumers whose choices were not artificially restricted by the state (Smith, 2000).
We know where that liberalism has evolved to today: something far more feral. In multiplexes ruled by media conglomerates, you can’t even go to the toilet without being force-fed advertisements. Your capacity for independent thought is eroded, and your privacy is collateral damage.
You’re “free”, of course. You’re free to buy a very expensive “discounted” bucket of popcorn with a coupon, then fight the induced thirst with boutique “premium” water in glass bottles, and maybe offer your date an overpriced ice-cream bar. You are absolutely free to perform all of this.
Bad Neighbours Make Landlords
In mother!, the female protagonist shares one enormous point of overlap with the viewer: the violation of privacy. The mechanism of that violation is inheritance.
Framed this way, the narrative invites us to polarize it along two axes—privacy and inheritance—and to examine how those forces interact.
Mikhail Bakunin argued that one of the deepest roots of class inequality is inherited property. Even if social policy managed to iron out income disparities among citizens, the institution of inheritance would simply reintroduce inequality in the next generation (Bakunin, 1992: 41).
He’s not wrong. But to implement his utopia, Bakunin needs something more: chaos. His ideal society feeds on a democratically generated chaos. The corrupt present order must be completely destroyed so that humanity can evolve. For that, you need anarchy.
Once the chaos burns out, the first signs of the ideal society appear: a world with no private property, composed of real individuals, each sovereign over themselves but never wielding that sovereignty over another, kept in check by new ethical norms forged in the fire of upheaval (Bakunin, 1992: 88–90).
Seen through the combined lenses of Bakunin and Smith, Aronofsky’s story sits squarely on the tension between these two dynamics. If we accept that the “inheritance” in the film is embodied by the crystal (the diamond-like object) and the child, then the vulnerability of individually held property shows us how quickly an established order can collapse into chaos.
Guests, Hosts, and the End of Privacy
Because the story is glued to Jennifer Lawrence’s character, her discomfort becomes ours. Her child becomes our child. This isn’t just a narrative trick; it’s practically a hardened convention.
From the first frames, the viewer is forced to confront a lack. The film opens, almost like a student short, in bed. The coldness of the sheets, the absence of the partner who gets up and vanishes without explanation—this sense of missing warmth is projected straight onto the audience.
Then the doctor arrives. From the moment he steps into the house, he reads as an intrusion into the protagonist’s private sphere—and, by extension, into ours. From that point on, both she and we want the same thing: for this external element to leave.
In real life, the doctor–patient relationship begins with exactly this: a breach of privacy. Examination requires exposure.
“Salt preserves meat; what preserves salt?” In mother!, the doctor is the one who is ill—he has cancer. The “patient” is our protagonist: ostensibly healthy, content with her domestic role, and firmly attached to the house. Stripping away the allegory for a moment, we can say it plainly: we don’t want this man in the house. Where did he even come from?
In the liberal modern system Smith helped theorize, the nuclear family is the basic unit. It increases the state’s grip on society while giving the family itself a pleasant illusion of freedom. The father-in-law or patriarch is parked far away, in some distant village. Husband and wife rule their own little Eden like a local Adam and Eve.
The son no longer has to inherit the father’s trade; he can become an entrepreneur, chase big dreams, venture into commerce.
In this context, the doctor is like a distant relative who shows up uninvited—but also the vector for expanding the “trade volume” within the story. The writer’s creative productivity—his return to writing and selling books—depends on the doctor’s presence.
If our protagonist were the writer, we could read the doctor as a muse in disguise: someone who heals his creative impotence and reignites his career, even though he doesn’t particularly desire children or domestic continuity.
But because our identification is firmly locked on the woman, another reading emerges. From her perspective, the doctor is a Trojan horse: he infiltrates private property and plants the seeds of collective life inside it, poisoning her carefully shielded existence.
As Bakunin points out, the system is destabilized when property passes to the next generation as inheritance. The crystal the couple receives is shattered—literally—by the doctor and his wife. Stripped of any aura of privacy, the inherited object is handled, dropped, and destroyed.
Within this frame, the person who brings collective life into the protagonist’s private realm is also the one who directly attacks her inheritance. That is the kind of act we would normally associate with a radical, even Marxist, levelling of property.
From the moment the crystal is destroyed, our protagonist can be read as an evolutionary condensation of all those figures whose historical job it was to guard the hearth: the one who keeps the fire alive, tends the home, produces children. She becomes a stand-in for property and capitalism—the maternal body that produces and then protects what it has produced.
By contrast, the patient, the doctor, and the writer together represent a collectivist, socialist/communist order, the “male” face of the state—intrusive, systemic, but not overtly brutal toward women.
In that sense, Aronofsky’s choice of a woman as protagonist is not incidental. She embodies a capitalist, property-oriented, quasi-matriarchal order that produces but also insists on the right to guard what has been produced—pitted against an anarchic, collectivist, but male-coded swarm that brings chaos in its wake.
The guests—homeless, displaced, rootless bodies—force their way into a private home and shatter what equilibrium there was.
Owner, Landlord… But Who Was Here First?
If the film didn’t end exactly as it begins—if that crystal we read as inheritance weren’t carefully put back into place, glowing as before—I wouldn’t be making any of these accusations. I’d stick to polite talk about allegories, nod wisely and say, “Yes, that clearly symbolizes X,” and close the file.
Aronofsky doesn’t allow that. The circular ending pushes the interpretation into uglier territory. The film’s classically circular Hollywood structure locks us into a familiar loop and relegates “progress,” or evolution, to the status of mere illusion.
Whether the new crystal and the new woman bring anything better to this world is a question the film refuses to answer. What it actually shows us is catastrophe, over and over. The takeaway is brutally simple: Do not open the door to strangers.
The male characters are deliberately impotent. They can’t impose boundaries, can’t protect. Many viewers will feel the urge to shout “Do something! Save your wife!” at the screen. This feeds into a belief that male weakness in the public sphere leads directly to social chaos.
We witness a story in which mercy and forgiveness—the so-called “virtues”—are ground into the dust. The horror is explicitly tied to collective life and shared ownership. The narrative weight tilts toward a worldview in which private property and possessive attachment to the home are subtly validated, precisely because everything else is coded as apocalypse.
At the same time, we shouldn’t ignore the writer’s behaviour. When his fans invade the house and violate the couple’s property, his attitude is strikingly liberal. He keeps saying, in effect, “Let them be, let them pass.”
So the film isn’t just attacking anarchic, communal existence. It’s also skewering liberal permissiveness.
What does that leave? If anarchy/communalism is chaos, and liberalism is cowardly complicity, the narrative gently herds us toward one remaining option: a system that embraces capitalism while discarding liberalism. A system we’ve already seen in the recent past, one that has shaken the world hard enough to be instantly recognizable.
That’s why mother! is both visually stunning and ideologically troubling. Its closed protagonist—this woman with whom we are forced to identify, but who is structurally trapped—anchors a worldview that is hard to swallow. For all its cinematic brilliance, the ideological undercurrent and the “no exit” subject position it offers are, in my view, not a subtext we should accept without a fight.
References
Bakunin, M. (1992). The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871 (R. M. Cutler, Trans.). Prometheus Books.
Smith, A. (2000). The Wealth of Nations. The Modern Library.
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