‘A movie star turn of the highest calibre’: we were wrong about Mother! – and Jennifer Lawrence

Jennifer Lawrence in Mother! ‘What begins as a surrealist take on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? devolves into a full-blown Boschian nightmare – and through it all, we are with Lawrence.’ Photograph: Niko Tavernise/Paramount Pictures

No actor defined the 2010s more than Jennifer Lawrence. Less than halfway into the decade, at the age of 22, Lawrence had won the hearts of audiences as the hero Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games, and a best actress Oscar for her performance in Silver Linings Playbook (famously tripping en route to accept it). She was bold, beautiful, brash and inescapable; her self-deprecating humour paired with megawatt talent made her a messiah for millennials – until she wasn’t.

By the decade’s midpoint, the internet seemed to sour on Lawrence as quickly as it had fallen in love with her. Her foot-in-mouth disease began to offend instead of charm, and her dominance in the media teetered into overexposure. “I just think everybody had gotten sick of me,” she reflected in 2021. “I’d gotten sick of me.”