Martin Scorsese defends mother!: 'It was so tactile, so beautifully staged and acted'

'I was extremely disturbed by all of the severe judgments of it'

The Rotten Tomatoes-ification of film appraisal is something we discussed on our film podcast recently (below and here), and it's clearly playing on Martin Scorsese's mind too, the director writing a guest column in The Hollywood Reporter this week in which he outlines how "the brutal judgmentalism that has made opening-weekend grosses into a bloodthirsty spectator sport seems to have encouraged an even more brutal approach to film reviewing."

It's a fascinating and article piece, and focuses in on Darren Aronofsky's mother!, which recently came in for savages reviews and an 'F' from Cinemascope.

Not only was Scorsese disheartened by the ridicule it received, he actually seemed to quite like the film:

"After I had a chance to see mother!, I was even more disturbed by this rush to judgment, and that's why I wanted to share my thoughts. People seemed to be out for blood, simply because the film couldn't be easily defined or interpreted or reduced to a two-word description. Is it a horror movie, or a dark comedy, or a biblical allegory, or a cautionary fable about moral and environmental devastation? Maybe a little of all of the above, but certainly not just any one of those neat categories.

"Is it a picture that has to be explained? What about the experience of watching mother!? 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."

Scorsese went on to say that he fears this reductive approach to critiquing films - their being either "fresh" or "rotten" - will only become more egregious.

"Tomatometer ratings and Cinemascoregrades will be gone soon enough," the auteur concluded. "Maybe they'll be muscled out by something even worse."

Read our recent interview with Scorsese here.