David Lowery’s Mother Mary is an art-pop fantasia about a broken artistic collaboration between a superstar and her costumer, treated as a haunted, quasi-religious rupture, where magic lies in the gap between imagination and perception. With songs!
★★★½
Mother Mary follows global pop superstar Mary (Anne Hathaway, sinking her teeth into the performance) as she tracks down and confronts Sam (Michaela Coel, flinty, mercurial, very good), the designer she once relied on to shape her image, in the days before Mary’s comeback spectacular. Mary assails Sam in her remote country retreat, and asks her to create a new look for her return. Sam is resistant, but gradually the pair’s intimacy, resentment, and a long-buried split are uncovered. Sam’s process involves probing Mary’s psyche, and the act of creation starts to take on a strange charge, as if what they made together has a life of its own.
Lowery reaches for transcendence here, as he frames their reunion almost abstractly, as a magical story about a traumatic rupture in their spiritual dyad. As Sam and Mary isolate themselves to work on the dress – and each other – their psychic turmoil pushes through a series of two-headed tussles over the past, through a chalk-circle ritual, and eventually into the supernatural.
Along the way, there are some moments of real magic. Anne Hathaway gets a muscular, music-less dance sequence, scored to the sound of her breath-work as her body spins and repeatedly hits the wooden floor. A séance flashback, led by a phenomenal FKA twigs (showing off her own control of physicality), shifts the film into a horror register. And Anne Hathaway is spectacularly haunted by the ghost of the broken relationship, across a series of stylised tableaux that lift the movie up into the ethereal.
This all recalls the symbolic mode Lowery pushed in The Green Knight. Halo crowns, staging, and ritual are central, Mary is treated as a living icon, suffering under the shadow of death, and the whole is fed through a combination of Vox Lux’s interest in the way trauma feeds performance and In Fabric’s fascination in the way objects – and dresses – can hold a mystical charge.
Sadly the dialogue will be a hurdle for many. Arch and overwritten, it works against the quiet magic of the material. Sam and Mary stake out their positions in long declarative speeches, desperately in need of streamlining, and the pacing too often grinds to a standstill. Make no mistake, Mother Mary drags. We get it, Mary needs something that pushes against her previous image; she wants to ditch the cod-Catholic disco halos. Girl, just say sorry to your mate and get yourself to JC Penney, that’ll bewilder everyone.
But Hathaway and Coel are strong enough to make these scenes at least partially work, gamely feeding off each other’s energy, and the audience’s rewards for all that cod-Pinter status reversal repartee, and the quasi-Persona identity merging dialogues, include some epic concert sequences. These are far more convincing than, say, Vox Lux’s, that really do sell Hathaway as some kind of megastar. The banging dance tracks and power ballads from Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs go a long way here.
More importantly, Mother Mary channels real magic, with moments of glorious mysticism and beautiful irreducible images (including some gorgeous 8mm backstage footage, awash with light-leaks and grain).
Lowery treats that magic seriously, and that saves the film – it summons images that are allowed to retain their mystery, even after the concert lights dim.
Mother Mary is in cinemas in the US and UK now.
Whitlock&Pope 