Death is not the only way to grieve someone you love. Sometimes the deepest sorrow comes from living alongside the absence of someone still alive; through broken relationships, betrayals, or simply the quiet drift of wayward souls growing apart. There is a particular ache in caring for someone you feel deeply wounded by: once inseparable in each other’s lives, now distant and unreachable. Mother Mary, David Lowery’s beguiling, seductive, and obvious meditation on fame and friendship is determined to chart that pain: the memories, the estrangement, and the fragile possibility of reconciliation between two souls divided by art, ambition, and emotional ruin.
Mother Mary proclaims in its tagline, “this is not a ghost story” yet an overwhelming sense of haunting lingers over the entire piece. When a world-famous singer seeks out her estranged former fashion designer, their reunion ignites a passionate and volatile unravelling of trauma, guilt, and psycho-thriller melodrama. While lacking the fully realised artistry of The Green Knight, David Lowery nevertheless crafts something hypnotic: an observable yet mesmerising chamber piece that luxuriates equally in metaphor and music. It is also a film unwilling to offer concrete answers, drifting instead through wavering emotion and memory.
Pop icon Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) has known Sam (Michaela Coel) for 25 years. As both the stylist and designer behind Mary’s gothic, biblically inspired fashion, Sam once shared a close creative partnership with the singer, that is until Mary abruptly cut ties with her a decade earlier. After an onstage accident forces Mary out of the spotlight, she begins preparing for a comeback, only to become overwhelmed during a costume fitting and suffer a panic attack. Desperate, she flies to London and asks Sam to create a new dress within the week. It soon becomes clear that the dress is less a practical commission than a metonym for their fractured relationship, with Mary using the project as an excuse to draw close to Sam once again.
Sam takes Mary to her barn-turned-workshop, revealing the successful design career she was forced to build from the pain of Mary’s betrayal. The space is packed to the rafters with commissions, frantically managed by an underused Hunter Schafer as Sam’s assistant, Hilda. In its tango between creativity and passion, the film gradually reveals that Mary once claimed sole credit for one of Sam’s designs – most notably a Vogue cover depicting Mary as Joan of Arc. For Sam, Mary’s iconography has always been something “we” created together, including the singer’s defining visual motif: the halo, which Mary now insists be absent from her comeback performance.
Sam speaks almost entirely in riddles and metaphors, at one point even acknowledging to both Mary and the audience that her phrasing could be considered “exhausting.” While David Lowery’s script often becomes overly indulgent in its inescapable symbolism, going so far as to label Mary a carcinogen in the film’s opening moments – it still finds an earnestness in unpacking the layered history between the two women. Sam agrees to make the dress only if Mary submits to her grudge-fuelled process, which includes forcing the pop star to dance to her new single without any musical accompaniment, as Sam has refused to listen to Mary’s music since their fallout. As radiant Michaela Coel is at delivering her weighted judgement, Anne Hathaway relishes the scene with raw authenticity, moving as though she is swimming through a pool of tears and regrets.
Breaking up the intimate monologues between Sam and Mary are the film’s striking performance sequences of Mother Mary on stage. With songs written by FKA twigs, Jack Antonoff, and Charli XCX, alongside a score by Daniel Hart, these musical interludes revel in glittering artistry and sumptuous choreography, offering the audience a release from the claustrophobic intensity of Sam’s workshop. Choreographer Dani Vitale carefully frames Mother Mary as both an icon and a deeply taxed figure. Anne Hathaway delivers a capable vocal performance throughout, her presence on stage constantly shadowed by the lingering spectre of Sam’s uncompromising artistic genius she has, regrettably, co-opted as her own.
Mother Mary ultimately frames art as an inherently collaborative process, one that rarely offers a clean equilibrium of recognition. When the film shifts into a more speculative, supernatural register in its final act, some viewers may find themselves as disoriented as Mary and Sam are within their splintered friendship; frustrated by a tonal turn that feels both elusive and overly portended. Those who stay with it, however, are rewarded with echoes of the past that land in unexpectedly reverent, spooky, and moving ways. There is also a lingering suggestion of something queerer in the bond between these two doomed artists, an undercurrent that David Lowery seems to keep just behind the curtain, never fully exposing it to the stage.With an entrancing performance by Michaela Coel, striking staging, and evocative cinematography, Mother Mary builds an emotional throughline for those willing to move in step with David Lowery’s often excessive directorial rhythms. It stands as an imperfect but intoxicating experiment in tracing the intersections of creative process, artistic collaboration, and the shame that shadows fame, ambition, and guilt. If a spirit does haunt Mary, it is regret that feels like its eerie rallying cry.
