‘Mother Mary’ Review: Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel See Red in David Lowery’s Dramaturgy of Pop Divinity [A-]
David Lowery’s bewitching new film, Mother Mary, begins with flashes of grainy imagery that seem to simultaneously spring from the archives of a concert documentary and a phantasmagorical fever dream. It’s at this intersection of reality and fantasy where Lowery’s best films burrow under your skin, lingering long after the credits roll. While Mother Mary still finds the director focusing on some familiar themes, like the vice grip that the past can hold on his characters, the film also allows him to mine new territory. In exploring the estrangement and subsequent reunion between a pop star and a fashion designer, Lowery exposes the inherent clash between the outward-facing and invisible sides of a creative partnership. While the script is dense and heavy on the use of metaphor, Mother Mary is a bold new creation that pivots from chamber piece to surrealist gothic horror, all while maintaining the modern auteur’s visual flair and signature style.
In what feels like a stylistic twist on the instruction, “This film should be played loud!” at the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, Lowery includes a title card that states, “Cover your ears, this song is curs’d” before introducing the story at the center of the film. It’s a playful wink to a film genre that highlights musicians at the peak of their powers, immortalizing not just their music but also the lives of the artists behind the songs. It’s also a funny warning with a bit of a mystical edge; be careful not to fall under this pop star’s spell. It’s specifically an instruction from Sam Anselm (I May Destroy You’s Michaela Coel), a London-based fashion designer, who, for the past ten years, has sworn off the music of her former friend and muse, Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway). In a voiceover that feels like a theatrical monologue, Sam orients the audience to her side of the fallout with the mysterious Mother Mary, introducing another common duality that Lowery weaves through the film without giving away any expositional details. In the ten years that Sam and Mother Mary have lost each other, she describes how closely love and hate are bound, all the while realizing that her former friend deserves neither.
In the first promotional trailer for Mother Mary, Lowery told the audience, “This is not a ghost story.” It contains those themes to be sure, yet what’s different in this tale is that for Sam, there is something even more devastating than death in Mother Mary’s departure from her own life. She isn’t a ghost, but a very real global pop star on the precipice of a comeback, whose ubiquitous presence haunts Sam in a different way. She did have “the greatest hits in the years of our Lord 2003-2013,” after all. In a bit of a melodramatic, gothic turn, Mother Mary turns up at Sam’s buzzing atelier one night in the pouring rain. After getting past Sam’s assistant Hilda (Euphoria’s Hunter Schafer), the makeup-free, drenched pop queen shares that she needs a dress for her performance, and they only have one night to complete it. She is performatively contrite and doesn’t really care that they haven’t seen each other in ten years or that the notice is so short that they could be on Project Runway. She hasn’t felt like herself lately, and she knows that Sam will be able to make her a dress that feels like it belongs to her. She also implicitly knows the power that she’s able to wield, even with a decade of hatred sown in between them. Despite comparing Mother Mary to a carcinogen and bile rising in her throat, Sam doesn’t kick her off the estate and instead takes her to her workshop, a stunning 800-year-old barn on the compound. Sam knows that she shouldn’t invite this presence in, but she can’t resist, despite her hatred and protestations. As Mother Mary describes the dress that she’s looking for, she can only articulate that she wants to feel like herself and gain a sense of clarity. Sam knows her better than anyone else. It’s here that Lowery first notes that these two characters are spiritually linked, as Sam describes her as a “secret twin” when she senses that Mother Mary is en route to Heathrow from LAX and about to pay her an unexpected visit. Not saying Mother Mary’s name or avoiding her music can’t keep her away, and the horror is that Sam did nothing to conjure her presence.
For Sam, working with Mother Mary also gives her the chance to have the upper hand and feel the sensation that her former friend once again needs her. Coel delivers a commanding performance, exuding a power in her own space and traces of deep scars from the wounds of time. There’s an iciness to Sam that has seeped into her environment as well, with Lowery’s camera always framing the blue and tungsten hues with rigidity and stillness. Yet, there’s a dark sense of humor in the character and in Coel’s performance that illuminates a desire to be the one pulling the strings in their creative partnership once again. Sam is a character who is a natural contradiction; a woman who doesn’t let us know whether she’s happier about her former friend’s return than she’s ready to let on or simply eager to exact retribution. There’s something delicious in watching Sam relish in the emotional torment and chaos of the woman who wronged her, but there’s also something intriguing about Mother Mary’s painful past. What made her show up at Sam’s door after all of these years? What’s smart about the introduction to the character is that her appearance is stripped down, yet still feels performative. There’s something theatrical about the contrast between her bejeweled, pop diva costumes and the Balenciaga loungewear with wet roots in need of a touch-up. Without revealing to Sam exactly what happened when she had her much-discussed breakdown, it feels as if she’s still performing a version of what she believes a star in distress might do. Much like the pop stars she’s emulating, Hathaway keeps Mother Mary an enigma, careful not to reveal which version of her character (notably always called “Mother Mary”) is the real thing or a facade. Like Coel’s rendering of Sam, Hathaway’s take on her character is incredibly complex, creating a woman who is unknowable, yet whose fans and personal acquaintances may believe to be authentic.
Mother Mary also has to be able to dance in the dress that Sam makes, and it’s in a striking long take that Hathaway’s excellent performance really comes to life. She intends to wear the dress during a performance of her new song, “Spooky Action,” a tune she says “might be the best song written in the history of songs,” with a tinge of both humor and sincerity. Sam has no intention of breaking her streak of avoiding her songs, so Mother Mary performs the choreographed dance without any music, only the sounds of her breath and her movements filling the sequence. It’s gorgeous, physical work from Hathaway that, when paired with her sequences on stage performing in flashback, feels like a portrait by an artist completely aware of her character and how her real-life persona informs it. Lowery has credited Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” tour with inspiring the visuals for Mother Mary’s concerts (eagle-eyed Swifties will spot Mother Mary’s snake tattoo, no doubt), but the strongest connection to Swift (and many modern pop performers) lies in the character’s own fixation on the public’s perception of her, the need for reinvention, and the desire for authenticity.
Notably, Lowery shows Mother Mary and Sam’s inner worlds through striking visual sequences and manifestations of their experiences. This is first apparent in the vibrant concert scenes, featuring pop earworms from FKA Twigs, Charli XCX, and Jack Antonoff, and production designer Francesca Di Mottola’s (I Am Love, The Great) smart staging, which provides a contrast to the silence and the stark, Medieval architecture of Sam’s workspace. Costume designer Bina Daigeler (TÁR) and visionary couture designer Iris van Herpen also create a halo-wearing, Joan of Arc version of the artist that feels close to Madonna’s singular grasp on the pageantry and aesthetics of Catholicism and pop music. This feels especially true when Sam recalls the designs she crafted for Mother Mary at the beginning of her career, which cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story) beautifully depicts as visions or saintly miracles she has in the middle of her workroom. As Mother Mary morphs into a horror-tinged expression of feminine divinity, Lowery leans into the mysticism at the core of Catholicism. While the script can make it feel as though the characters are constantly speaking in metaphors, Lowery leans heavily into the language and religious themes at the core of Sam and Mother Mary’s creation of their shared and separate artistic identities.
While Mother Mary does have horror themes, this film is (as Lowery described) not a ghost story. Instead of encountering a ghost that characters would find in a traditional horror movie, Sam and Mother Mary learn that they’ve separately seen an entity called “The Red Woman,” whose appearance is best left unspoiled here. While there is some religious-inspired imagery connected to The Red Woman (stigmata on Bloody Mother Mary, naturally), her presence manifests and contains different meanings for the two women. This is most beautifully detailed in a sequence that recalls the dream ballet in Powell and Pressburger’s artistic portrait, The Red Shoes. As Mother Mary takes the stage and Daniel Hart’s (The Green Knight, The Old Man & the Gun) elegant score plays, the audience isn’t visible to her, and she has a vivid experience that reflects what’s spinning in her mind as she performs. And much like The Red Shoes, the complications of a twisted partnership reverberate on the edges of the sequence. Religious figures and pop icons are connected in what they bring to an audience, and it’s unique that Lowery strips away this more obvious comparison in this scene to focus on the internal.
In a recent interview with Letterboxd, Coel listed Andrey Zvyagintsev’s Loveless as one of her four favorite films, specifically mentioning the quote, “you are God and the Devil rolled into one.” That duality also runs through the women at the center of Mother Mary as they unravel the thorny feelings that they have for each other and the history of their artistic partnership. Despite the seriousness of the relationship and some of the film’s themes, Lowery also understands the melodrama and the theatrics that are the beating heart of many creative industries and collaborations. Like Lowery’s best films, Mother Mary is about the ephemeral and the eternal, yet in an entirely new package for the filmmaker. It’s a beguiling, religious experience that will only get richer with the passage of time.
Grade: A-
A24 will release Mother Mary in select theaters on April 17 and wide on April 24.
- ‘Mother Mary’ Review: Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel See Red in David Lowery’s Dramaturgy of Pop Divinity [A-] - April 14, 2026
- The 79th Cannes Film Festival Lineup is Here, With A Strong Global Slate of Films from Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Cristian Mungiu, Jane Schoenbrun, and More - April 9, 2026
- ‘The Drama’ Review: Zendaya Gets a Case of the Mondays in Kristoffer Borgli’s Twisted Marriage Story [C+] - March 31, 2026
‘Mother Mary’ Review: Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel See Red in David Lowery’s Dramaturgy of Pop Divinity [A-] 
65th Critics Week (Semaine de la Critique) Lineup of the 2026 Cannes Film Festival Announced 
AwardsWatch Podcast Ep. 340 – Oscars Retrospective of the 64th Academy Awards 
Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) Announce Dates for 2027 and 2028 Awards