Mother Mary
Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel spar and star in a tale of one-upmanship set in the world of fashion and pop.
Taylor-made: Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway
Image courtesy of A24.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
A psychosexual pop thriller or a musical ghost story about a dress? A bit of both, really. There are elements here of Bergman’s Persona and of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric (2018), but this being a work from David Lowery, it is very much its own thing. And, depending on one’s cinematic taste, it’s either an existential masterpiece or a claustrophobic piece of self-indulgent codswallop.
Mother Mary is the most famous pop star in the world, an icon whose success is dependent on those who are hired to make her look great: her backing dancers and musicians, her choreographer and publicist, her lighting director and dressmaker. Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel) was her dress designer (and more besides), until an on-stage accident severed their relationship, Mary went into hiding and Sam became an internationally celebrated fashion designer. The years moved on and as Mary plans a comeback tour, she decides there is only one person on earth who can make her a dress to live up to the occasion. It has to be an outfit that reflects Mary’s own qualities – and nobody knows her better than Sam Anselm. However, Sam is now extremely busy and in demand and Mother Mary’s comeback concert is just three days away. Before then, as Mary emerges from a downpour in the English countryside, she and Sam have to put aside past differences. Sam now has the upper hand, Mary is the fragile one, because Mary needs from Sam what no one else can give her. Not just a dress, but a symbol of her previous lives…
Whatever you say about the writer-director David Lowery, he is one of the most original filmmakers working today, with an astonishingly catholic back catalogue: Pete’s Dragon (2016), A Ghost Story (2017), The Old Man & the Gun (2018) and The Green Knight(2021). Quite an eclectic mix. His Mother Mary is largely a chamber piece, essentially a two-hander in which an outsider pits big words against a celebrated central figure, much as Michaela Coel did with Ian McKellen in The Christophers. Here, she’s up against Anne Hathaway embodying a variation of Taylor Swift, now a bedraggled, frail shell of her former self who has to apologise to the woman who helped facilitate her rise to superstardom. But Mary has a surprise up her sleeve (which is obvious quite early on), although Sam now uses her own hard-won power to humiliate her former lover.
As usual, Michaela Coel is sensational, mesmeric even, telling us in voice-over at the start: “’You are a carcinogen,’ I would say to her. ‘You are a tumour, whose malignancy has defined the ebb and flow of all I’ve done, of all I’ve tried to do.” When Mary turns up out of the rain and, less eloquently, says: “Sam – I need a dress,” Sam continues to baffle her with big words, saying “I’ll take your feelings and turn them into a dress – the transubstantiation of feeling.” These are heady pronouncements and one senses that Lowery presumes some people might really talk like this. But people don’t, so it’s best to take Mother Mary as a play of ideas, a theatrical distraction laced with atmosphere. He has secured excellent performances from his two leads, the gender opposites of Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay in The Dresser – and English-speaking equivalents of Alma and Elisabet Vogler in Persona.
Cutting from the claustrophobia of Sam’s studio space to flashbacks of Hathaway in concert (singing her own songs) – going the full Taylor – Lowery seems at pains to bring a cinematic sweep to this intimate tale of lost hopes and malice. Were it not for Michaela Coel, though, this talky, stylised and frequently static “thriller” might be accused of being a rather pretentious thing.
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Alba Baptista, Sian Clifford, FKA Twigs.
Dir David Lowery, Pro Toby Halbrooks, Jeanie Igoe, James M. Johnston, David Lowery, Jonas Katzenstein, Maximilian Leo and Jonathan Saubach, Screenplay David Lowery, Ph Andrew Droz Palermo and Rina Yang, Pro Des Francesca Di Mottola, Ed David Lowery, Music Daniel Hart, original songs by Jack Antonoff, FKA Twigs and Charli XCX, Costumes Bina Daigeler, Sound Johnny Marshall.
Homebird Productions/augenschein Filmproduktion-A24 Films/Amazon Prime.
111 mins. USA/Germany. 2026. UK and US Rel: 24 April 2026. Cert. 15.
