‘Mother Mary’ Is the Mother of All Modern-Pop Superstar Nightmares

By David Fear

David Fear

She is a little bit Gaga, a little bit Dua, a smidge of Doja and Charli. She’s a whole lotta Madonna, and the sort of mega-monolithic musical superstar who could easily devote world tours to her many different eras. She is an icon, in both the modern use and, given her penchant for heavily Catholicism-influenced haute couture, the traditional sense of the word. Some might say she is mother. To her millions of fans, she is Mother Mary, chart-conquering singer and conduit of the divine experience known as the epic, arena-echoing pop anthem.

And right now, Mary (Anne Hathaway) needs a dress. A special one. Desperate times require desperate measures, which is how this dance-pop idol ended up on the doorstep of the last place in the world she’s welcome. So much of Mother Mary’s look — as important to her reign as her music — came from the vision of a single collaborator, a fashion designer named Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). They crafted the persona that would become a global phenomenon. Then Sam was cast out, in the name of Mary going after something “new.” It broke her heart and messed with her head. She took refuge in a large English country estate.

That was a decade ago. Sam is now preparing for a big show of her work. And Mary, who had… let’s say it was an “unfortunate incident” during a concert that went viral, has come calling once again. The singer has booked a big comeback performance. It may or may not be Mary’s final blessing upon the masses. But the dress she had custom-made is simply not cutting it, and she needs Sam to make her a new one ASAP. “It was all wrong,” Mary says, by way of explanation. “It’s not a dress at all,” her former friend replies, after seeing a picture of it. Still, she will create something new for the star — a stage outfit that doubles as a dish best served cold.

This is the basis of David Lowery’s Mother Mary, a mix of psychological drama, fashion-forward A24 horror, and a full-on pop-star nightmare that, on paper, sounds like the sort of streamer-friendly catty camp that Ryan Murphy could milk for several seasons. The gap between that description and the surreal, personally expressionistic film up on the screen, however, could not be wider. Weird is such a dismissive adjective for things that people don’t readily understand, or complex work that wears is idiosyncrasies on its bell sleeve. But the writer-director behind The Green Knight and A Ghost Story has taken the most accessible subject imaginable — stratospheric pop stardom — and made something wonderfully, gloriously weird out of it. Not even original songs written by Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX and FKA Twigs, all of which sound like bangers you’d hear in a haunted nightclub at 4am, can make this feel mainstream. Forget the hit parade. This tale of two creative types hashing out unfinished business is a fucking head trip.

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Having set Coel’s grudge-nurturing immovable object and Hathaway’s in-crisis irresistible force on a collision course, the film proceeds to let the former batter the latter with a mix of acidic banter, passive-aggressive comments masked as curiosity, and complisults that cut bone. Moving the proceedings to a barn that serves as Sam’s workshop, the two muse over old wounds and try to engineer a few fresh ones. The first half is more or less a two-hander, with Sam channeling her hurt into sketches for potential, outrageous “hate dress” in between going for the jugular and Mary gamely absorbing every verbal body blow that comes her way. This is the power dynamic. Anything resembling sympathy will reveal itself to be a knife.

It’s not a coincidence that the first thing we see in Mother Mary is the title character heading toward the stage and preparing to tear into an elaborate number, yet hear Sam lambasting her ex-employer and close companion (“You are a carcinogen. You are a tumor.”) in voiceover. It goes without saying that Coel is as gitfed a performer as she is a writer — see also, currently at a theater near you: The Christophers — and few can handle caustically witty dialogue with such variety and brio as she can. It’s another exhibit in the case for the I May Destroy You star truly being a sui generis generational talent. As for Hathaway, she leans into the physicality of her pop star on the brink of a breakdown. There’s a moment in which, forbidden to sing her new single, Mary has to wordlessly dance to demonstrate the feel of it. It’s the sort of highly kinetic sequence, punctuated by smacks and thuds against a hard floor, that gives you the same thrill as watching chase scenes and barroom brawls onscreen.

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That ditty we never hear, by the way, is called “Spooky Action” — both an in-joke and a clue as to where Mother Mary is eventually heading. For a while, it’s content to be a chatty new addition to the canon of Gothic fashion parables, a genre that runs the gamut from the 1945 French drama Falbalas to Phantom Thread. In fact, that second title might have been a good alternative name for Lowery’s eerie creepshow, especially once it switches from cinematic costume-design-fetish (it’s impossible to overpraise costume designer Bina Daigeler’s work here) and opts for a more unsettling, dread-inducing approach. A number of presences, including Hunter Schafer‘s busybody assistant and Kaia Gerber’s entourage hanger-on, flit about on the periphery while the leads conversationally duke it out. Shortly after the halfway mark, the movie morphs into something closer to an unofficial three-hander.

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