By John Serba

Director David Lowery’s one-for-me-then-one-for-them filmmaking rotation hits the “me” spot with Mother Mary (now streaming on VOD platforms like Amazon Prime Video), a surreal, challenging two-hander starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel. Full stop: Lowery is low-key one of the best working behind the camera these days, elevating Disney live-action remakes Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan and Wendy to near-art, while putting serious visionary spirit into dense and ambitious films-for-adults like A Ghost Story and The Green Knight (wildly underrated; one of my absolute favorite films in recent years). Here, the director double-barrel unloads heady religious imagery within the story of a pop superstar – singing songs by Jack Antonoff, FKA Twigs and Charli XCX, who’s having herself quite a cinematic 2026 – ending a lengthy estrangement with her fashion-designer friend, hoping to exorcise what might be an actual, legit ghost. 

MOTHER MARY: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Bile, vitriol, hatred: Three key ingredients to this opening voiceover monologue by Sam (Coel), who calls her former friend, pop star Mother Mary (Hathaway), “a carcinogen – a malignant tumor.” They haven’t spoken in more than a decade. As Sam spews venom into our ears, we see Mary on stage wearing her signature iconic halo, singing and dancing and then falling off an elevated stage, and the vague, blurry image makes one wonder if there’s a noose around her neck. There wasn’t. But even the briefest examination of Mary’s expression suggests little relief that she survived. She looks haunted, exhausted, desperate as she arrives at Sam’s doorstep in rural England, soaked by buckets of rain. She pushes past managers and handlers and seamstresses until she finds Sam, who’s none too happy to see her former friend. She didn’t want to see this relationship be – what’s the right word here? Resumed? Mended? Resurrected? Resurrected. That’s it. Bam. Bullseye.

Mary needs a dress. Sam used to make them for her. In fact, Sam was the key architect of Mother Mary The Famous Pop Star’s immediately recognizable aesthetic. As these things go, Mother Mary is as much fashion icon as chart-topper. But 10 years or so ago, the working friendship or whatever it was ended – and the screenplay is purposely sketchy on the hows and whys of it all, and whether there was something romantic or sexual between them. Read into it or take it at face value, it’s your choice. Four years have passed since Mary toppled off that platform. She hasn’t performed since and she’s making a comeback and needs the perfect dress and what others have made for her aren’t working. There’s a long, pink scar down Mary’s spine, as prominent as the Great Wall of China. Sam reluctantly agrees to design the dress, and in a subtly Phantom Threadlike moment, she and her minions begin taking measurements.

I’ll read one thing into it: Sam takes the gig so she can interrogate Mary. And maybe torment her a little bit too. But Mary is already so tormented that whatever Sam dishes out is just absorbed into the roiling mass of misery that is her psychological state. Mary dictates some design elements for the dress: No red, and no halo. Sam sees her goal: to express “clarity.” The dress will be for the song – and get a load of this title – ‘Spooky Action.’ Sam asks Mary to perform the dance that accompanies the track, but as Sam no longer listens to Mother Mary’s music, Mary has to do it in silence. She grunts and moans as she steps and leaps and slides, her limbs audibly slapping against the floor. There is pain in her art, never more so than now. They share words that are blunt in their emotional impact but vague in their details until the thing about the ghost comes up. “This is where it gets strange,” goes the line of dialogue. I can’t remember whether Mary or Sam said it, but it doesn’t matter. Things got strange for both of them, and it’s going to get stranger still now.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Vox Lux comparisons are superficially viable but otherwise off the mark. Lowery cites Taylor Swift’s Reputation concert film as an inspiration, and for Hathaway it was Beyonce’s Homecoming. I saw Under the Skin in some of the film’s hypnagogic visuals – and a blend of tones and visual reference points that Lowery used in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, A Ghost Story and even Peter Pan and Wendy.   

Performance Worth Watching: Coel is a powerhouse, giving an arrestingly complex performance – but FKA Twigs sears herself into the memory with a drop-in single-scene role that’s best left for you to see for yourself. 

Sex And Skin: A brief scene in which Hathaway climbs out of a bathtub.

Our Take: Superficially, Lowery keeps this narrative tight and focused: a two-hander about a single fraught, fractured relationship. Thematically, it’s another story – there’s spaghetti on the wall, on the floor and all over the stove and countertops, and there’s even a noodle or two dangling from the ceiling. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The Venn diagram of Mother Mary’s reflections on art, religion and suffering is a circle. Within those ideas spring forth multiple huffing and snorting demons ranging from the cost of fame to depression to the act of creation itself. Pop stars are uniquely situated not just as musicians sharing pieces of themselves through song, but as godlike icons creating imagery, ideology and motion, and inspiring worshipful cultlike followings. And so Mother Mary at one point suffers a de-facto stigmata wound, a rather bloody heavy-handed bit of symbolism if I’ve ever seen it.

That isn’t a complaint. I’m pretty much obligated to mention the film’s moment of meta-commentary in which an exasperated Hathaway declares, “These metaphors are exhausting.” With Mother Mary, Lowery stacks up metaphors like a rickety Jenga tower, but is never so careless as to knock it over. The film’s precarious sense of narrative stability is what keeps it alive, Lowery expressing a fascination with the messy psychological sprawl of a person who has become as godlike as a human can get, nearly superhuman.

And that leads to another super – supernatural, allowing Lowery to indulge the reflexive dreamlike imagery that defines his filmmaking aesthetic. He builds to a powerhouse sequence, a phantasmagoric flashback that could function as a standalone nightmarish concert film, inspired as much by David Lynch and Jonathan Glazer as it is by the plethora of Swift/Gaga/Madonna/Beyonce concert films and Lowery’s standby influence, Terrence Malick. (My secret hope is that Mother Mary functions as an audition tape for Lowery to helm a Bjork concert film.) The result is haunting, weird and intensely memorable, Lowery and his cast walking the razor’s edge of disaster via a narrative that could be howlingly awful or embarrassing if overseen by a filmmaker with a weaker grasp on their pretentious visionary qualities. Better pretentious than bland, I always say – far better – although we who revel in Lowery’s zealous artistic pursuits will inevitably forgive him Mother Mary’s overwrought extravagance.

Our Call: Equal parts inspired and ridiculous, Mother Mary is a love-it-or-hate-it affair. And I kinda loved it. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.