“Mother!” is too much allegory and not enough story.

Director Darren Aronofsky has a great track record making dark character studies (“The Wrestler”, “Black Swan”), but the characters populating his latest film are more symbolic than human. His script for “Mother!” may seem to be telling a story about a young woman whose tranquil life with her husband is disrupted by a mysterious couple, but it’s supposed to be a biblical allegory about the torment of Mother Earth. The movie’s first half plays like a horror movie, but the preachy pretentions of the second half ruin the scary fun and make for the most confounding film of the year so far.