A spooky tale of friendship and loss, David Lowery’s Mother Mary is a fascinating and engaging film about celebrity stardom. Starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, the film follows the reunion between estranged former best friends, the titular pop star Mother Mary (Hathaway) and the fashion designer Sam Anselm (Coel), after the former commissions a dress for her comeback performance from the latter.
First and foremost, the performances from the two leads are excellent. The film is more or less a chamber piece, so Hathaway and Coel shoulder the weight of the film for essentially its entire runtime, a commitment that they both pull off admirably. Hathaway, fresh off her career renaissance with roles in The Devil Wears Prada 2 and The Odyssey, delivers her best performance in years, masterfully communicating the deep turmoil and complexities of Mother Mary and navigating the paradox between her love of her fans and her desire for freedom and privacy. Coel—in her first major film role—is not intimidated by the more experienced Hathaway, holding her own against the big star much in the same way that her character challenges the self-deception of Mother Mary.
While the film may not be as epic as Lowery’s previous outings The Green Knight and Peter Pan & Wendy, he makes up for it through his laser focused attention to the emotional nuances of his story, allowing the film to flourish despite its muted narrative. While one could not really characterise Mother Mary as a horror film in any conventional sense, Lowery’s background in the horror genre provides him with the familiarity to infuse his film with some of the genre’s aesthetic elements, allowing him to characterise the rupture in the leads’ friendship as a sandbox of anger and fear.
The film’s cinematography and editing are quite incredible, both creating images and sequences that will undoubtedly remain with the viewer long after they leave the cinema. Unlike some films that feature original compositions by fictional musicians, Mother Mary’s songs—composed by pop royalty Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twings—are surprisingly good, with interesting instrumentation and Hathaway’s excellent vocals elevating them to tracks that you would want to listen to even divorced from the film’s context.
Overall, Mother Mary is a thoughtful and engaging film that has something for everyone to enjoy, and will certainly leave the viewer with much to think about.
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