‘Mother!’: The movie Andy Serkis called “unlike any film I’ve seen”
Few actors ever make it to the big time, but even fewer come into global recognition in a niche manner, like Andy Serkis. Known for his motion capture, voice acting and animation work, Serkis has achieved a rare form of celebrity by playing a series of computer-generated characters throughout his career.
Indeed, Serkis has comprised some of the most memorable animated characters of all time, from Gollum in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy to King Kong in the epic adventure film of 2005 to Caesar in the Planet of the Apes reboot series of the 2000s, proving his talent time and time again.
Like any figure in the film industry should, Serkis has proven himself to be a big lover of the cinematic medium, and he has regularly gone on record to share some of his favourite movies. We know full well that the actor admires Niki Caro’s The Whale Rider and Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, but his cinematic love does not end there.
In terms of more contemporary cinema, the one movie that seemed to make the biggest impression on Serkis was Darren Aronofsky’s 2017 fantasy drama Mother!, a truly unique work of film starring Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfieffer and Domnhall Gleeson.
In an interview with the BBC, Serkis stated his deepest cultural loves and having discussed the brilliant of Sam Mendes and Jez Butterworth’s play The Ferryman and the music of Nitin Sawhney; he turned his attention to the peculiar Mother! by the director of Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream and The Whale.
“I really loved it,” Serkis said. “I just think its boldness is quite brilliant, I mean, it’s absolutely crazy, it’s fantastic, it makes you mad.” Mother! is loosely inspired by the Bible and tells of a young woman married to an obsessive poet struggling with writer’s block, whose idyllic life is disrupted by the arrival of a strange couple.
Continuing to express his deep respect for Mother!, Serkis said, “You’re on the edge of your seat, you just do not know what’s going to happen next, it’s an assault, it’s thrilling and it’s unlike any film I’ve seen in recent times.” Indeed, there is real intrigue to Aronofsky’s film in that it never really reveals just what is going on until well into its runtime.
Mother! is rife with symbolism, as is often the case with Aronofsky’s films, so it’s a movie that can at once blow an audience away but then reveal more of its narrative secrets with repeated viewings. What Serkis admires the most about Mother! is how it transgresses the “safe and normal” space of cinema in search of something far deeper and more shocking.
“We’re so conditioned into wanting something which is safe, and normal, and being dumbed-down, just not making space for these really unique voices like Aronofsky,” the actor said. “I think what he’s achieved is incredible.” In addition, Serkis loves the way that Aronofsky often explores the theme of obsession, certainly in Mother!, but also by extension in Requiem for a Dream and Black Swan.
Signing off with his thoughts on Mother!, Serkis noted, “It examines the dry, cloying, alienating, bloodsucking nature of celebrity, and how obsessive that can be. You need those films alongside all the superhero movies.”