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Hi, this is Dana Steven Slate's movie critic, and I'm here with the Slate, spoiler special podcast on Darren Aronofsky's mother.

Or maybe with the exclamation point in the title, we should say, Mother!

Jeb!

I don't know how you say the small M. Maybe you just whisper that letter or something.

So I'm here in the studio at Slate with Sam Adams, the editor of Browbeat Slate's culture blog. Hello, Sam. Hello. And with Forrest Wickman, our culture editor in chief. How are you, Forrest? I'm great. I'm so glad the spoiler special is back. I know you guys already like saying Hosanna's last week, but I would like to add one additional Hosanna as a long-time fan of the spoiler special. Yeah, me too. Yeah, this is the second one after the relaunch. And we've been really lucky to have it and mother to spoil in these few weeks because they're both highly, highly spoilable. And the kind of thing that if you've seen the movie, you want to talk about it and hear what other people are saying about it. And as may be more the case with the movie we're talking today, if you don't want to see it but still want to hear people talking about it, this is kind of the ideal place. I think that was also true of it. I did not see it. I was very eager to listen to the spoiler special because I was too much of a scary cat. All right, well, if you are a scarity cat about intense movies, this is definitely one that you might want to think twice about going to.

But I'm going to do my usual. And before we start spoiling, go around and get your sort of basic critical reaction and whether or not you would send total strangers into the strange twisted inferno that is mother for us.

It's interesting that you phrased it that way.

I would both say that I liked this movie and have come to like it more as I've talked

about it more with other people and read about it more.

It's just a fun movie to talk about.

I think it's more fun to talk about than to watch, arguably.

But I have not formally endorsed this movie to anybody because I'm so afraid that I'll send somebody and then they'll come back furious at me for suggesting that they see this movie.

Yeah. It definitely inspires those kind of intense reactions. And I saw it alone and came out dying to talk about it with someone. And also just noticing that everybody else on their way out was having heated pro or con conversations or just big head scratchings.

All right, Sam, what about you?

I would gleefully recommend this movie to complete strangers just for fun, just to see what happens.

Yeah, it's a hard movie to say, you know, you like exactly. I didn't have a sort of profound, like, psychological reaction to it. It didn't, it didn't shake me up. As I know, you know, it has some other people. For one thing, I kind of saw it in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival. And that's just sort of when you're seeing like five movies a day. It disperses the impact. It does. It does a little bit. Yeah.

But like Forrest, I mean, I've just found it really like I like talking and thinking about this movie. And it's been a lot of fun to watch the very polarized reactions to it. Indeed. So let's start talking and thinking about it. And it's worth noting also as we begin, and this is, I think,

was somewhat of a surprise to the critics who were so kind of excited to chew it over after Toronto is that it completely tanked at the box office, right? It's, it made, I think, $8 million or something

in its first weekend. And this is a movie that cost maybe $30 to $40 million. So it definitely

was not a commercial success.

It hasn't exactly been a critical success either, but it's been a critical sort of word of mouth conversation piece.

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