(David Lowery, USA, 2026, 112 minutes)
When I find myself in times of trouble
Mother Mary comes to me
–Lennon-McCartney (mostly McCartney), "Let It Be" (1970)
Mother Mary, David Lowery's third for the studio, plays like a parody of an A24 film. That isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it isn't a great one either.
Lowery's latest is stylish as hell, but the writer/director/editor mistakes ponderousness for intensity and repetition for incantation. He's played with these elements before, but to more successful effect, particularly in 2021's The Green Knight, his mesmerizing adaptation of a 14-century text.
Though it's something new for him, since pop stars aren't his usual purview, his eighth feature feels like a mashup of other films in which woman is pitted against woman and bodies are pushed to the limit, especially Showgirls, The Black Swan, The Neon Demon, and Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria remake.
Lowery would also appear to have some familiarity with Peter Strickland's The Duke of Burgundy, which depicts a world without men, and In Fabric, which revolves around a red dress with a rather insidious mind of its own (there are male dancers in Mother Mary, but they don't say a word).
Anne Hathaway plays the title character, an American pop star eager to make a dazzling return to the stage after an unfortunate incident in the recent past, and Michaela Cole plays Brit Sam Anselm, her former costume designer. For reasons never made clear, the performer abandoned the designer en route to superstardom. Sam was the friend and collaborator who knew her best, so this seems like a self-defeating move on Mother Mary's part, but that's Lowery's point: along the way, she lost herself.
Fair enough, but who is she, really? Hathaway gives it her all, but the part is woefully underwritten. It doesn't help that she's limited to a stage name--as if she never had a real one, while Sam has the advantage of authenticity.
Nor does Lowery do as much with all the Catholic iconography as he could. The Biblical name recalls Madonna, who was raised Catholic--as was Lady Gaga--and there's also a halo headpiece and a palm wound, but there's no talk of religion. Nor is there any information about her background, relationship status, or sexual orientation. I believe it's intentional, but that doesn't mean it works.
Mother Mary is, for instance, curiously sexless. Granted, some pop star films, like Performance and Pink Floyd - The Wall, take that kind of thing pretty far--especially where drugged-out male stars and female groupies are concerned--but these ladies might as well be asexual. Sam's dialogue suggests that she and Mother Mary once had a thing, or felt a certain attraction, but who's to say. With her cutting remarks, which grow tiring after a while, Sam comes across as a spurned lover, but the lack of sexual tension between the two suggests that any relationship was in her head.
Instead, Lowery posits that the two have a supernatural connection represented by--wait for it--a red dress. When "The Red Woman," as he terms it, makes her debut crumpled up at the foot of Sam's bed, she recalls the creature in Possession, an inspiration the filmmaker has confirmed, except the reference diminishes his film by comparison, though those unfamiliar with Żuławski's baroque masterpiece may feel otherwise.
It's a cliché that pop stars abandon the people who helped to make them famous, and it really happens--and will keep happening as long as we have pop stars--but the trick is to do something intriguing with the concept. Unfortunately, there's too much buildup here, and not enough payoff.
Once Lowery establishes that Mother Mary and Sam have a psychic connection, there's nowhere left to go. Though he incorporates elements of self-destructive body horror, which may be strictly metaphorical, the ending suggests that it's better to accept your demons than to deny them.
Good idea in theory, but after Sam's cruel words and Mother Mary's red-rimmed regrets, I expected more than the equivalent of a pep talk. I also expected more from Coel and Hathaway, but they're boxed in by one-note characters. From start to finish, Sam is bitter and Mother Mary is contrite.
The designer's unwillingness to accept the singer's apologies, which seem sincere, makes her less and less sympathetic as the film goes on--she twists the knife further by insisting she never listened to Mother Mary's music--not least since she appears to have done just fine on her own. Her connection to a superstar likely helped her to secure seed funding and to attract deep-pocketed clients. She's also surrounded by other self-possessed women, like Hilda (Euphoria's Hunter Schafer), her attentive and efficient assistant. Sam isn't as isolated as Mother Mary, but for whatever reason, she's just as lonely.
It's also unfortunate that the other performers have so little to do; I found it particularly disappointing vis-à-vis Sian Clifford, such a fine foil for Phoebe Waller-Bridge on Fleabag and a star of her own in the upcoming Lady.
Granted, FKA twigs, who contributed a song--"My Mouth Is Lonely for You"--has one showy scene where she conjures up a spirit before disappearing, but model Kaia Gerber mostly just stands around looking like a model.
If the entire film took place in Sam's under-lit, barn-like atelier, it might be an unbearable slog, but Lowery frequently cuts away to scenes of Mother Mary in concert, and Hathaway impresses with her solid singing, sure-footed dancing–particularly in the expressive sequence in which Sam commands her to enact the choreography for "Spooky Action" in silence–and enviably-toned legs. (Costume designer Bina Daigeler, a favorite of Pedro Almodóvar, clearly took cues from Taylor Swift's leg-lengthening stage looks.)
The other songs, written and produced by Charli xcx and Jack Antonoff, aren't the most memorable, but they go down easy, and the album, Mother Mary: Greatest Hits, holds up fine when divorced from the outré visuals.
After the triumph of Steven Soderbergh's The Christophers, I was looking forward to watching Michaela Cole go head to head with another locked-in performer, but Mother Mary doesn't strike the same sparks. It's more of an audiovisual feast with a few eye-catching frocks, but the broad-strokes characterizations leave the whole thing feeling a little threadbare.
Mother Mary opens on Thurs, April 23, nationwide and in Seattle at the Regal Meridian. Images from A24 via Indiewire (Anne Hathaway), Fox Searchlight Pictures / The Hollywood Reporter (Natalie Portman), Phantasmag (Hathaway and Michaela Cole), Inverse (Coel with "The Red Woman"), and Eric Zachanowich via AP / Hartford Courant (Coel).
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