MOTHER MARY
2026
Written and directed by David Lowery
Going into this present decade, David Lowery would've been on a sufficiently long list of new filmmakers that I felt genuinely excited about; and since then, his star has fallen somewhat for me. Part of it is just how he's heretofore spent the present decade: The Green Knight certainly had no shortage of admirers in 2021, but I wasn't one of them, and it's dysfunctionally "an art film" and "a deconstruction" that forgets to have any fun with its deconstruction (a deconstruction of, for some reason, an Arthuriana sideshow that has virtually no active relevance to anybody today), and frankly often forgets to be artful in any way you could readily describe without using the word "boring"; his follow-up was Peter and Wendy, and while I guess Lowery might also be one of the first names I'd think of if you kidnapped my family and demanded I choose someone to adapt J.M. Barrie's novel, that is a novel that has no business being adapted by anyone ever, everything good about it being tied inextricably to the attitude struck by its prose, and of course that's not even what that was, it was a Disney live-action remake, and even if one of the reasons I like Lowery is Disney's best remake, of the 1977 Pete's Dragon, by 2023 the process at that company had ossified hard, and whether or not it's disingenuous of me, I don't think I needed to see it, for all my information suggests that I wouldn't have liked it.
The other part of it just the way I've spent the present decade, becoming, I daresay, a lot more knowledgeable—or at least I've watched another 2000 or so movies—and therefore capable of recognizing what's being strip-mined for content, and it came as something of a distasteful surprise to realize how much of a pastiche artist Lowery is, without really announcing that himself like your Quentin Tarantinos or whoever, or having that become a major part of his reputation, the art filmmaker whose entire deal is making pastiches of other art films. A Ghost Story, a movie I raved about a decade ago, have owned for that long, and haven't rewatched since then? It's Such a Beautiful Day, and Malick. Ain't Them Bodies Saints? Also, I'm told, Malick—specifically Badlands. The Green Knight? Well, more than one thing (but maybe it needed more Malick?), though once it arrives upon The Last Temptation of Christ, it is, pretty egregiously, The Last Temptation of Christ. It turns out that his most original movie might be his first Disney live-action remake, which is at least refashioning its source material as an 80s kids adventure in a general way, rather than copying any particular one. Now he comes with Mother Mary, a movie that has the misfortune of being an unintentional knock-off, but I grant such a thing only because the chronology of its development (it was announced in 2023) seems to preclude my initial and very strong assumption about it, which is that Lowery had come out of (of all things) Smile 2 saying, "mm, that is good, but needs to be about 30% fartsier, and 50% less anxious about being a pop musical." (I would, to be fair, agree with the latter point.) But at some point on the production timeline I suspect he did see it; and besides that, there's the steady beat of grim pop star arthouse that we've had for years now, your Vox Luces and so forth, that does predate this film's origins, as would some pretty key visuals here purloined or at least reinterpreted from The Neon Demon, and, probably, In Fabric. But then, that's just the movies, ain't it? Or at least it used to be—everything cross-pollinated with everything else—and one doesn't need to mind it, especially when Lowery has, now, once again made something fresh and cool out of his influences. Would that such enthusiastic and creative pastiche were still rewarded in this world, but alas: it would be hard to avoid comparing the two films on the basis of general subject matter, and the fact they share a star means a comparison is nearly automatic, but this movie has earned 100 times less than the pure, blunt-force IP resurrection that it also shares a multiplex with, The Devil Wears Prada 2, and maybe that movie's even fine (the first was no better than fine), but, as usual with cinema in the 2020s, it's sort of sad.
So, Mother Mary, with one of its marketing taglines being "this is not a ghost story," and isn't that cute? It begins extremely aggressively, and let's go ahead and say it begins atrociously, with one of the most addled and addling opening gestures I've seen in a while, kicking off with a female narrator, who'll turn out to be one of our deuteragonists, pontificating—I mean this is some hardcore pontification—about, I think, revenge, over imagery of our other deuteragonist, experiencing a breakdown during a costume fitting, the narration taking the form of a monologue written so utterly pretentiously and gratingly I was genuinely having a difficult time following the substance of it over my own, internal monologue saying, "wow, is this ever a bad sign." This is interrupted by a fragment of a stage performance by our other deuteragonist, and after enough time has elapsed that you'd assume it wouldn't, it then goes to back to the pretentious narration for like another solid minute. And let's get ahead of the other thing: the movie's going to end with its emotional denouement, another (at least it's shorter or seems shorter) monologue, being delivered by Hunter Schafer, who plays a character of such small importance to the narrative (an obsequious assistant) that I can guarantee I will not mention her again in this review, and I really can't think of a more unforced error in a recent motion picture—this is especially true for a movie where a tremendous amount of it is not diegetic anyway, and the very foundation of it is a two-hander based on the virtually telepathic bond between its principals—than giving the movie's arguably most important dialogue (the argument that it isn't goes "actually, the ending doesn't need any further dialogue, and it just underlines how in love Lowery is with his own Goddamn verbiage) to a supporting actress who, not at all uncharitably, barely exists in it as a featured extra. This all only amounts to about three minutes, maybe four, out of 112*, but they are the most crucial ones, which sucks and we have to calibrate ourselves accordingly—even if it that does leave the vast majority of the movie able to be pretty excellent.
The "vast majority" begins, I suppose, as soon as we can shake off the negative feelings from the preface, which doesn't take too long, and what we have is a pop star of world-historical importance, a certain Mother Mary (given name never spoken—presumably Mary; Anne Hathaway), a figure that, so Lowery has said, is based primarily on Taylor Swift, and I half-wonder if he must've been fucking with the interviewer because obviously she isn't, even I know she isn't, because she's practically the opposite, for one thing how people are actually eager for Mary's comeback, but starting with how extremely overtly her long-established stage persona is that of a provocateuse in the vein of—ahem—Madonna, with the (contemporized) details we're able to piece together, notably a red carpet "dress" described as "Mary's nude body coated in a food product, in this case honey," pretty strongly pointing in the direction of Lady Gaga, while in a strictly literal sense "Mary" is Charlie XCX, FKA Twigs, and Jack Antonoff, who provided the songs that, as far as I can determine, Hathaway sings herself (Daniel Hart composed the score and seems to have been the organizing mind behind the music).
Anyway, Mary has had a bad last few years, suffering a grievous injury—I told you it's like Smile 2, and while it backs off for a while, it will become moreso—from falling (or, possibly, jumping) off a rafters-high platform during a performance, so I guess she's also based in this one respect on Katy Perry. She's back now, about to start a new tour, but you'll recall that breakdown I mentioned, which was triggered by shoving her head into yet another of her signature halos, and Mary storms off, vanishing out from under her many handlers, and appears at the door of the fashion house of her old designer, and perhaps her oldest friend—not that they would be friends anymore—Sam Anselm (Micaela Coel). Mary's request is a new costume for a show in three days. Sam, while reminding Mary that she hates and despises her because of how the latter overthrew her eighteen years ago, without even the politeness of an artistic break-up, nonetheless agrees to work with Mary one more time, also explicitly, or at least more-or-less explicitly, because Sam can use the time as an opportunity to finally hold her ex-partner to account, and Mary is willing to accept those terms because she's desperate to reconnect with the designer who essentially made "Mother Mary," and thus can, she hopes, unmake her.
This all takes place in a barn on Sam's country estate, that serves as her private workshop, by which I mean that, in a diegetic sense, it almost does entirely take place there, while for a goodly while this barn, and these two actors going at each others' throats to a greater or lesser degree, are literally what the movie is, and it's really exciting how small-scaled it manages to be while still feeling essentially "cinematic," partly because of the gritty fuzz the whole movie enjoys (even in its bombastic colorful parts), partly because of Lowery utilizing the alternatingly wide-open and claustrophobic spaces of this barn, and especially because Lowery, his editor, ah, David Lowery, and his cinematographers Andrew Droz Palermo and Rina Yang** are doing such awfully strong work delineating the shifting and often-overlapping boundaries between the two women, sometimes with showy cutting schemes and sometimes with just careful focus racking (which is as much to say that just because someone is talking doesn't necessarily mean they're immediately yanking the focal plane back to them). None of which would matter all that terribly much if Hathaway and Coel weren't pretty great, and both of them are, though Coel takes more time to warm up to because even if she's never asked to plumb quite the same depths as her opening narration, her character does talk like that.
Coel, fortunately, is pretty quickly making it clear that at least in her performance of Sam she's a bit of a satire of the type, incredibly pompous and something of a windbag (Sam has a tendency towards baroque speeches where the most pompous pronouncements stumble into the slightly wrong words, which at a minimum Coel is noticing, though I suppose I can give Lowery the credit of also knowing what he was doing, even if he also likes what he's doing too much***); whereas Hathaway's Mary is often found sputtering and gesturing and completely unable to find any words to finish a sentence without Sam. (Lowery is also giving each a surfeit of close-up singles, and Hathaway is demonstrating a downright uncanny ability to cry on the take, a trick that's arguably approaching "threadbare" by the end, though I don't think it ever gets there.) The give-and-take and grinding-away at old grudges between these two different personalities, bordering on two people speaking entirely different languages, gives it a real dynamism as drama—there's a showstopper of a sequence involving a dead silent exhibition of Mary's dance choreography for the new song she claims will be the capstone of her career if not the history of music altogether (for Mary, it should be noted, can also be extravagantly pompous), because Sam, and this is important, has refused to listen to Mary's music for many years, and will not listen to it now—and it's a remarkable movie we've got here, dealing with two very distinctive artists feeding on one other and openly resenting that they've so thoroughly defined each other. (The movie's not a humorless thing, either, though I might've accidentally implied it is: that dead silent dance recital is dead silent in part because it enlists Hathaway's physicality so thoroughly that it's as much a seizure as it is a dance; and because the question would come up, Sam damned well asks her how the hell she expects to sing in the middle of these exertions. Mary's answer is a terrific punchline.) It remains a keen examination of artistic collaboration, incidentally, even if the movie concerns a kind of artistic relationship that, to the best of my knowledge (which certainly might be incomplete), reflects very little in the real world interface of pop music and fashion design. But then, it's also fairly clear that Sam and Mary were more than collaborators, and I will leave it to you to decide whether it's good or bad that Lowery has decided to use barely-coded-but-still-coded sapphism as symbolism (I will offer that the melodrama would've been that much stronger if Lowery'd just made it part of the text, for goodness's sake), but it serves its purpose, at least, to give their artistic symbiosis, which is going to wind up in a place of literal artistic intrerpenetration, an even more intimate cast.
There comes a point, however, when the movie enters a different phase, and I'm not down on it, exactly, but I had been enjoying a cinematic-but-grounded chamber drama, and it feels like I ought to think it's some kind of problem that this couldn't carry a whole movie across without a director losing interest in it, which isn't exactly what happens, obviously, but I don't think it's a spoiler to mention that eventually Mother Mary is a ghost story, with a supernatural conceit revolving around how both Sam and Mary have been haunted by the same apparition. This phase starts off well enough—the movie does have need to eventually start getting into flashbacks (and by all means this musical needs access to musical performance!), and Lowery is doing some fun things to bring them physically into the space established by this barn, very much like stagecraft (it's a very playlike film, of course) punched-up by what you can get away with using the language of movies. And this phase continues well, because you can't get to the higher-test symbolic horror imagery that's plainly driving Lowery, at least as much as the substance of his characters, without it.
The best news about this, though, is that it does bring in that musical performance, and while maybe the songs are unlikely to be to all tastes I myself am a fair bit more interested in FKA Twigs and Charlie XCX than I was yesterday, and Hart is bleeding the songs into the score, generating an unusually high proportion of "score" for a movie that's never very far away from its music. Meanwhile, the numbers**** look radical, allowed to push "pop performance" into a state of nearly-pure abstraction, especially in a long sequence involving time compression and a long perfectly-lateral tracking shot (obviously with hidden edits) that emphasizes the grueling toll of performance, and the "reveal" of what happened to Mary in her grave accident is essentially a collection of threatening red geometric shapes representing maybe guilt, or self-annihilation, or something—it has an explanation firmly tethered to the plot, but in the moment, and there are a lot of moments like this liberally sprinkled throughout, it's genuinely mystifying in the finest manner of horror or art cinema, or the whole "A24" project of trying to combine the two (it is in fact an A24 film), which works here as well as it's worked in a goodly while. It might be needless to say, because it would have to be kind of a failure if they weren't, but Bina Deighler's costumes—plainly with some specific guidance from Lowery, as this dude does evidently love those halo crowns inasmuch as both of his past two auteur movies feature them heavily—are pretty incredible.
So it has its problems, which I've already talked about—that specific way the movie closes itself out is just baffling, it's so wrongheaded (though, wisely, we never truly hear the song of songs)—but those problems are on the margins, if you want to call "beginnings" and "endings" the margins, and in the main it's an intoxicating dive into a pair of broken artists who helped break each other, which means it's a movie about feelings, and I'm awfully happy to see Lowery returning to such a thing after the inert tedium of The Green Knight; in fact, barring Pete's Dragon's easier-to-come-by pathos, it might be the most emotionally-accessible movie he's made so far, and very plausibly it's his most visually-rich, even if you could practically have rendered the same basic story to something like the same success on a pretty minimalistic stage. But then, that sounds like a compliment to me.
Score: 9/10
*My theater declares the runtime to be 110. Either way, a right-sized movie, in the 2020s? Pretty tantalizing stuff!
**By this I probably mean Palermo, who's Lowery's main guy, while I think there's a very good chance Yang worked on fully separate parts of a film that asked for a VMA winner with a distinctive skillset honed on, inter alia, Taylor Swift videos.
***By the same token, however, his script isn't condescending: the Mary's going to debut is called "Spooky Action" and they don't halt the movie to explain a reference both characters already get. Which is nice; I believe I'll file "the near-absence of character biography, leaving it up to the actors to imply it," in the same category.
****This movie also shares a choreographer, Dani Vitale, with The Devil Wears Prada 2.
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