WARNING: The final scenes of the film are extremely intense, graphic, and unsettling. A review I read before seeing the movie for the first time said that a girl actually had a major panic attack due to the climax of the film and had to leave the theatre. To some, it may not be so bad, but to anyone who wishes to watch the movie, be aware that it could be problematic to some viewers.
The climax of the film centers around mother and His new life together after the events surrounding Man and Woman take place. Mother and Him have sex for the first time in a long time and immediately after this, she knows she is pregnant. Him is inspired to write down a new work of literature after a long case of writer’s block. He eventually publishes the book and it gains him many new worshippers and followers. This new writing is likely a representation of the New Testament, which is written partly due to the inspiration of his new child’s arrival, a lot like Jesus in the New Testament, though in this film the child is not yet born.
The book sells every copy almost immediately when it’s published and mother makes a nice dinner to celebrate, now very far along in her pregnancy. They are interrupted however by a large group of fans who show up at the door. Mother asks Him to send them away but He says he must be polite and go talk to them. Mother tries to lock the doors but more and more people keep slipping in to use the bathroom. They start stealing His belongings as souvenirs and damaging the house. Hundreds of people start filling the house and an increasingly disoriented Mother watches it devolve into chaos.
Mother witnesses hundreds of people rip apart every inch of the house and engage in religious rituals. The faithful worshippers get dirt smeared on their foreheads, representative of the traditional Ash Wednesday. Through this insanity, we are shown many representations of the crazy, horrifying things that have happened over the history of the human race, and how we’ve come together and continued to destroy the Earth. A character credited as Herald, played by Kristen Wiig, clearly represents a herald angel, who hypes up the word of God, or in this film His works, and eventually is shown to organize mass shootings within the home.
Throughout this mass hysteria, mother realizes she’s in labour and she searches desperately to find Him amongst the chaos. SWAT teams and other police officials arrive to try and control the giant mobs of worshippers. There are giant explosions, flashing lights and gunshots. Eventually mother finds Him and he reopens his study to have a quiet place to take her. She gives birth to their son and the crowd outside starts to subside. Him tells Mother his fans want to see their son but she refuses and holds her son tightly. When she falls asleep, however, Him takes their child outside to the crowd. She wakes up to realizes this and rushes outside to find him, but the baby gets taken by the mob of people and is literally ripped apart. Mother is hysterical over the death of her son and even more so when she realizes the crowd has actually started to eat the baby’s remains. It’s not hard to see by this point that the baby is a clear representation of Jesus, who was also killed by a large group of people and now people like to eat the (figurative) body of Christ. (White, 2017) This is perhaps one of the shortest-lived representations of a Jesus figure in film where the figure lives for a few hours at most, but still fulfills the purpose of sacrificial lamb for the sins of mankind. (May,1997)
Mother loses it completely and screams at the crowds calling them murders and starts stabbing them with shards of glass. The crowd starts the turn on her and they beat her senseless and strip her of her clothes. Clearly this is yet another representation of the way human beings have beaten and raped the Earth of all it has to give. Him intervenes and begs mother to forgive the people. She escapes, however, and runs to the basement. She punctures a hole in the basement’s oil tank and threatens to drop her lighter into the oil. Him begs her not to, but she yells at him that he never actually loved her despite the fact that she gave him everything. This is possibly meant to symbolize how “God’s cruelty — and his genius — is for his masculine nature to keep wiping things out and starting over, sucking every ounce of life and energy and creative force from the woman, who just gives and gives and gives.” (Wilkinson, 2017) She lights the house ablaze and the entire property, including the worshippers, are blown to pieces. This could be seen as a version of the part of the Book of Revelation when “seven vials (or, in some translations, bowls) of plagues are poured out, the last of which causes the foundation of the entire world to erupt.” (Riesman, 2017) A clear symbol of what some would call the Apocalypse.
Mother and Him both survive the explosion, though mother is terribly burned while Him is unscathed. He begs for her love in return and she agrees. He reached into her chest and pulls out her heart which he crushes in his hands to reveal a new crystal like the one previously broken by Woman and Man. He places it on its pedestal and once again the house is transformed from a burnt-out shell into a beautiful home. The final image is the exact same as the opening of the film, except this time a new woman wakes up in their bed and repeats the same first line as mother: “Baby?”. This could be seen as "the setting up of God’s perfect world after the trials and tribulations of Revelation. Some have translated the first line of Genesis not as the well-known “In the beginning,” but rather “In a beginning,” which would imply that God has created worlds before this one. Perhaps this is God stuck in a rut, cycling through world after world, hoping that each creation will be the one that finally works.” (Riesman, 2017)
