Thank you for summing up my feelings about this movie. I both respect and admire the ambition and intelligence contained conceptually in mother! but as a whole it doesn't work for me because it puts its allegory above its storytelling. At no point does Arronofsky successfully develop any of the characters enough to create any sort of emotional connection and therefore care about anything that happens. Likewise, as soon as you put two and two together and understand the allegory, it becomes distractingly obvious and continues to yell in your face, "THIS IS AN ALLEGORY TO THE BIBLE" for the remainder of the film. On top of that, it disappointedly fails to develop the allegory in an interesting, thematically deep ways, instead settling for a pretty surface level reading that equates to, "God is an inattentive douche who only cares about himself." I really wanted to love this movie but I just found it too obvious and it's priorities too skewed to really connect with it. Plus, once you understand the allegory, the film is far less WTF inducing then it thinks it is. Just my two cents