Critical response
Mother! received generally positive reviews from critics, who praised Aronofsky's direction and the performances, particularly those of Lawrence and Pfeiffer, while its biblical allegories and depiction of violence was scrutinized by some news outlets. The film received both boos and a standing ovation during its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 68% of 377 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7/10. The website's consensus reads: "There's no denying that Mother! is the thought-provoking product of a singularly ambitious artistic vision, though it may be too unwieldy for mainstream tastes." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 76 out of 100, based on 51 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews. However, audiences polled by Cinemascore gave the movie a rare average grade of "F" on an A+ to F scale. PostTrak reported filmgoers gave a 51% overall positive and a 33% "definite recommend".
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone awarded the film three and a half out of four stars, describing it and Aronofsky's direction as an "artist's cry from his own corrupt heart" and "a work of a visionary". He also praised the film's allegorical narrative and the performances of Lawrence, Bardem, and Pfeiffer, and said, positively, that the cinematography "always seems on the verge of exploding". Writing for the Chicago Tribune, Michael Phillips said: "Darren Aronofsky delivers a damning critique of the artist/muse arrangement, even as he admits to its old-fashioned patriarchal simplicity." He also referred to the film and its script as "grandiose and narcissistic and, in quick strokes, pretty vicious," while drawing a similarity to Aronofsky's film Black Swan.
Writing for The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw gave the film five stars, saying: "Darren Aronofsky's toweringly outrageous film leaves no gob unsmacked. It is an event-movie detonation, a phantasmagorical horror and black-comic nightmare that jams the narcosis needle right into your abdomen." Ignatiy Vishnevetsky of The A.V. Club gave the film a B+, writing: "the filmmaking ranks as some of Aronofsky's most skillful". Ben Croll of IndieWire gave the film an A−, noting: "Awash in both religious and contemporary political imagery, Darren Aronofsky's allusive film opens itself to a number of allegorical readings, but it also works as a straight-ahead head rush." In an essay for The Hollywood Reporter, Martin Scorsese said: "It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted—the subjective camera and the POV reverse angles, always in motion ... the sound design, which comes at the viewer from around corners and leads you deeper and deeper into the nightmare ... the unfolding of the story, which very gradually becomes more and more upsetting as the film goes forward. The horror, the dark comedy, the biblical elements, the cautionary fable—they're all there, but they're elements in the total experience, which engulfs the characters and the viewers along with them. Only a true, passionate filmmaker could have made this picture, which I'm still experiencing weeks after I saw it." In 2025, Scorsese further remarked on being "amazed" by Lawrence's performance and said: "She really is feeling everything that's happening, in what appears to be a dream of some kind." Director William Friedkin praised the film. Filmmaker Denis Villeneuve cited it as among his favorite films.
In a lukewarm review of the film, Owen Gleiberman of Variety called Mother! "a piece of ersatz humanity", and wrote, "By all means, go to Mother! and enjoy its roller-coaster-of-weird exhibitionism. But be afraid, very afraid, only if you're hoping to see a movie that's as honestly disquieting as it is showy." Rex Reed gave the film zero stars in The New York Observer, and wrote that, though it has some good cinematography, "Nothing about Mother! makes one lick of sense as Darren Aronofsky's corny vision of madness turns more hilarious than scary. With so much crap around to clog the drain, I hesitate to label it the 'Worst movie of the year' when 'Worst movie of the century' fits it even better." Reed further dismissed other critics' positive reviews of the film as "equally pretentious" and "even nuttier than the film itself. ... they all insist Mother! is a metaphor for something, although they are not quite sure what it is." Similarly, The New Republic's Jo Livingstone stated that the film has "no human center to hold it down". Anthony Lane wrote in his review in New Yorker that "My patience was tested beyond repair, I am afraid, by the nimbus of nonsense." In The Wall Street Journal, John Anderson said: "it achieves a level of excess that makes the whole enterprise increasingly cartoonish, rather than just awful." Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times rated the film two out of four stars, writing that, though he appreciated Lawrence's performance, he questioned whether Aronofsky was mocking certain biblical passages featured in the film or presenting a commentary on an artistic process. Writing for The Washington Post, Anne Hornaday gave the film two stars, saying: "Even Lawrence's magnetic powers can't keep Mother! from going off the rails, which at first occurs cumulatively, then in a mad rush during the film's outlandish climax."
Stephen Whitty of the Newark Star Ledger wrote: "one part early Roman Polanski, one part pseudo Harold Pinter, and two parts apology-from-a-driven-artist. And none of it adds up. The feeble idea behind Mother! isn't strong enough to bear the weight of all the overwrought style he hangs on it. Unlike the mansion it's set in, it's a small, hammered-together thing, and it can't bear all this meaning and metaphor." Chris Nashawaty of Entertainment Weekly said: "Darren Aronofsky's Mother! is Rosemary's Baby amped up into a fugue state of self-indulgent solipsism. He's an artist. And he really wants you to know that he's been thinking a lot about what that means. Unfortunately, his gaze is so deep into his own navel that it's just exasperating." David Edelstein of New York magazine shrugged off the film and any talk of its craft, writing: "Most of the dialogue and effects are clunky, repetitive, second rate."
In July 2025, it was named 461 in the "Readers' Choice" edition of The New York Times' list of "The 100 Best Movies of the 21st Century".
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