Mother Mary

With Mother Mary, David Lowery does not deliver the backstage chronicle or glittering rise-and-fall melodrama its arena-sized imagery might suggest. He makes something stranger and far less accommodating: a Gothic chamber piece about two women who once manufactured an icon together and have spent a decade pretending that severing the partnership also severed its emotional hold. The film begins in the intimidating glow of pop worship, with Anne Hathaway framed beneath elaborate halos before oceans of illuminated phones. Yet the spectacle is quickly abandoned for a storm-lashed English estate, where the bedraggled superstar Mother Mary arrives without warning at the atelier of her former costume designer, Sam Anselm, played by Michaela Coel. She needs a dress for an imminent comeback. What she really seeks is more dangerous: recognition from the one person who knew her before the image swallowed the woman.

The request turns into an all-night reckoning. Sam Anselm, who helped invent the singer’s quasi-sacred visual language and was then discarded as fame accelerated, has built an empire of her own, but success has not cauterised the wound. Michaela Coel gives her anger a wonderfully controlled temperature; a raised chin or carefully delayed reply can wound more deeply than the screenplay’s grandest declarations. Opposite her, Anne Hathaway strips celebrity of its armour. Offstage, Mother Mary is pale, soaked and frightened, constantly seeming to hold herself together with her own hands. Their encounter becomes a reversal of the old hierarchy: the woman once left in the shadows now dictates the conditions, while the global star waits to be measured, questioned and judged. The film wisely refuses to define whether their intimacy was romantic, creative or both. Labels would make it smaller. Their bond resembles the most combustible artistic partnerships, where authorship, desire and resentment have become impossible to separate.

One scene expresses that dependency better than pages of dialogue. Because Sam Anselm has refused to listen to Mother Mary’s music since their separation, she orders the singer to perform her new choreography in silence. Designed by Dani Vitale, the dance is reduced to feet striking wood, breath breaking and a body repeatedly thrown against the floor. Anne Hathaway is astonishing here, not because she convincingly imitates a pop star, but because she makes performance look like an injury voluntarily reopened. The sequence also reveals the film’s sharpest idea: music, clothes and movement are not accessories to identity but tools through which an artist tries to discover whether an identity remains. The comeback gown is therefore less a costume than a surgical instrument. It must reveal Mother Mary, even though neither woman can agree on who that is.

That tension is embedded in the production itself. David Lowery reportedly studied Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour film while imagining the concert sequences, although the character carries traces of many modern divas: the Catholic provocation of Madonna, the sculptural theatricality of Lady Gaga, the regal distance of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Crucially, Anne Hathaway performs the vocals herself, supported by original songs associated with Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff and FKA twigs. The tracks are persuasive enough to establish a career, though the film deliberately offers only fragments of the intoxicating concert movie it might have been. Rina Yang photographs the stage as a black cathedral, while Andrew Droz Palermo turns the atelier into a cavern of damp stone, timber and midnight blue. Bina Daigeler’s costumes, culminating in a creation by Iris van Herpen, bridge flesh and sculpture so beautifully that fabric seems capable of remembering every body it has touched.

Halfway through, Mother Mary slips from bruising relationship drama into supernatural horror. A séance conducted by Imogen, played with uncanny economy by FKA twigs, introduces a red apparition that resembles silk, blood, smoke and exposed tissue at once. It is an inspired visual cousin to the plain white sheet of A Ghost Story, but where that earlier spectre embodied absence, this one suggests a connection that refuses to die. The concept of “spooky action at a distance” becomes an emotional model: two people, separated for years, still altering one another’s lives. Every song can be read as a séance, every garment as stored memory, and the haunting as the unpaid debt of collaboration. This is where David Lowery is at his most distinctive, transforming the barn into a porous mental space in which recollections are staged before the women without conventional flashback cuts. Past rooms materialise inside the present location, as if memory were another piece of scenery that can never be struck.

The audacity is also the film’s limitation. Its religious iconography—halos, wounds, sacrifice, resurrection—often possesses more visual force than thematic precision, and the dialogue can become so intoxicated by allegory that the characters themselves seem aware of the strain. For all its talk of worship, the film never entirely demonstrates why millions adore Mother Mary; we glimpse the machinery of iconhood without experiencing the irresistible communion that sustains it. Supporting figures played by Hunter Schafer, Sian Clifford, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay and Alba Baptista flicker at the margins, reinforcing the sense that the central pair are trapped in a private cosmology. Viewers who want firm answers about the apparition, the women’s past or the violence surrounding the comeback may find the final movement frustratingly opaque. Ambiguity can deepen a mystery, but here it occasionally feels like an ornate veil placed over ideas the film has not fully resolved.

Still, Mother Mary is far too singular to dismiss as empty provocation. It captures something painfully recognisable about estrangement: the fantasy that one perfect conversation might retrieve the person we were before a decisive rupture. Michaela Coel supplies the film’s gravity, making cruelty feel like grief that has learned immaculate manners, while Anne Hathaway gives one of her most physically exposed performances, moving credibly between supplicant and deity. Their duel keeps the film alive even when its symbolism threatens to close around it. David Lowery has made a work about the exploitation hidden inside collaboration, but also about its miracle: two artists may damage, consume and abandon each other, yet create something neither could have summoned alone. Uneven, hypnotic and defiantly peculiar, Mother Mary does not always transubstantiate its ideas into emotion, but when it does, the result feels less like a pop concert than an exorcism performed under stage lights. 

Mother Mary
Written and Directed by David Lowery
Produced by Toby Halbrooks, David Lowery, Jeanie Igoe, Jonas Katzenstein, Maximilian Leo, Jonathan Saubach
Starring Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, Sian Clifford, Atheena Frizzell, FKA twigs
Cinematography: Andrew Droz Palermo, Rina Yang
Edited by David Lowery
Music by Daniel Hart
Production companies: A24, Topic Studios, Homebird Productions, augenschein Filmproduktion, Sailor Bear
Distributed by A24 (United States)
Release dates: April 24, 2026 (United States)
Running time: 112 minutes

Seen on 7 September 2026 (VOD)