Mother! of all freaky cinematic hellscapes

Jennifer Lawrence stars in Mother! and at one stage said she felt the movie "went too far". Photo / AP

Have you seen Mother! yet? If not (and if you plan to), stop reading, because we're about to take a deep dive into the movie's finale, when an intimate psychological thriller transforms into the cinematic version of the debaucherous hellscape from The Garden of Earthly Delights.

You may have seen this coming, and not just because writer-director Darren Aronofsky loves to make audiences squirm. When the drama hit the festival circuit, it was divisive. Anthony Bourdain attended an early secret screening and declared that it was going to upset people. And it did. At the premiere in Venice, its closing credits were met with a mixture of boos and fervent applause, and the critical response has been similarly conflicting. Even the movie's star, Jennifer Lawrence, said that when she first saw it, her reaction was, "we took it too far". But later, she changed her mind. "We have a message and if we watered it down to make people comfortable then what's the point?"

And what scene sent her over the edge? Perhaps the moment her character's baby is taken from her, forced to crowdsurf above a sea of crazed zealots, then murdered and eaten. Aronofsky's movies tend to have imagery that can never be unseen no matter how badly you might want to wipe your mental hard drive. Like Ellen Burstyn's jittery meltdown in Requiem for a Dream or the dreaded Black Swan hangnail.

Mother! is going to be too much for some, given that there's no bigger movie taboo than killing a child, especially a baby.

But it's not the only disturbingly unforgettable moment. Other horrifying contenders include Kristen Wiig ordering hooded people to lie down, then shooting them; a kindly cop in riot gear getting his face blown off; and Lawrence's character (known only as mother, lowercase and all) setting herself on fire.

All this is troubling enough without the increasingly kinetic atmosphere and camera movements. The first two-thirds of the movie take place in a quiet house, but during the climax, droves of people arrive, turning the mansion into a loud dance club, then an even louder war zone.

There may be nothing quite as alarming, though, as the final scene, which isn't even violent. It echoes the very beginning of the movie, when Javier Bardem's poet character (called Him in the credits) places a crystal on a pedestal, which returns his burned-out hull of a house to the stately mansion it once was. Then Lawrence's character wakes, calling for her husband. The final scene is the same, only the person that pops out of mother's bed is a different woman. One of many readings is that the emotionally distant Him is just using these women to fuel his creativity, sucking them dry, tossing them aside, then replacing them with a newer model and doing it all again. That's some pretty demented stuff. After Lawrence read the script, she told a crowd at the Toronto International Film Festival that she threw it across the room and informed Aronofsky that he had "severe psychological problems".

Of course, she's dating him now, so she can't think he's too unhinged. She also called the movie "a masterpiece," but you may see it differently.