Two years after the final Hunger Games film, Jennifer Lawrence starred in Darren Aronofsky’s mother! The writer/director released Noah three and a half years earlier and, after toying with a children’s film, decided to tell another Old Testament story—one Paramount gave $30 million and a wide release to. Part conservationist allegory, part Biblical retelling, and full-on fever dream, mother! came out to what may be the least surprising ‘F’ CinemaScore to date. People were over Lawrence. Audiences wanted something that made sense. Above all else, America wouldn’t take its alleged blasphemy.

But it’s hard to call the film itself unsurprising. Rather, it unscrews its simplicity to a rabid, even blackly comic, degree. Lawrence plays a woman only credited as “mother” who renovates the country home she and her older husband, Him (Javier Bardem), live in. Then a married couple (Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer) shows up, only for countless others to follow. It descends into chaos, yet the filmmaking grows into some of the most technical and aggressive to come out of a major studio in recent memory. Calling mother! blunt is an understatement, but the question remains: does it know that?

There’s disdain toward its characters on display. Does that include its lead? Its mise-en-scène—almost only shots of Lawrence’s face, her point of view, and from over her shoulder—makes its perspective clear. But at what cost? Is the film misanthropic or simply misogynistic, and how do the two overlap or divorce given its nightmare logic? A tale of celebrity, a gnostic fable, a critique of the muse-artist relationship—maybe it’s all of them, or maybe none matter. Perhaps mother!’s ultimate joke is that it’s a male auteur telling on himself time and time again... for better and for worse. – Matt Cipolla, co-programmer “Who Gives an ‘F’’