I'll echo Zac. This one tries to cram the entire kitchen sink into the film, hitting every major sociohistorical angle so that there's so many secondary threads being juggled that Sarah and I were trying to figure out what could be cut without hurting any of the film's core and letting it be a bit tighter. It's odd to think of Mother! as tightly constructed, but whether it be the Amish/Mennonite, Baader Meinhof Group, or Klemperer's past, so many bits don't quite add up to enough to anchor this film. And because Suzy is less of an innocent in this film, it's difficult to parse where our interest or sympathies should reside. Mia Goth's Sara comes to the fore in the second act, but she disappears in the admittedly bravura third act, and so the go-for-broke finale doesn't quite have an emotional anchor.

At times it's almost as distractingly over-directed as Thoroughbreds, but Guadagnino does deliver a good first viewing, but I suspect repeat viewings will lose esteem since so little exists to reward multiple viewings and so much exists to make me wish for a tighter film.