A stylistically audacious but emotionally spare portrait of fame, possession and creative entanglement
The new film Mother Mary arrives as a lush, theatrical exploration of celebrity and symbiosis, one that privileges image and sensation above tidy explanation. Directed and written by David Lowery, the picture pairs a pop superstar played by Anne Hathaway with a brilliant and bitter designer portrayed by Michaela Coel. Shot partly as concert spectacle and partly as a shadowy housebound drama, the movie stages an intense reunion between creator and created that drifts into hallucinatory territory. This piece summarizes the film’s attributes, highlights technical contributions, and weighs whether atmosphere here compensates for a sparse central story.
The film’s official details bear noting: rated R, a running time of 1 hour 52 minutes, and a release date listed as Friday, April 17. The cast includes Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, Sian Clifford, Atheena Frizzell, FKA twigs, Jessica Brown Findlay, Kaia Gerber and Alba Baptista. Behind the scenes, Lowery also serves as writer, with cinematography by Andrew Droz Palermo (and concert sequences shot by Rina Yang), a score and songs involving Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX and FKA twigs, and costumes that include a striking piece by Iris van Herpen. These credits set the stage for a film that bristles with craft even when its emotional architecture feels intentionally fragile.
At its strongest, Mother Mary is a sensory confection. The film stages performances as long, choreographed tableaux where light, color and movement dominate narrative logic; the concert scenes were influenced in part by the film of Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour, an inspiration Lowery has acknowledged. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo renders the stage and the designer’s rural atelier in equal measure as operatic spaces, with a penchant for saturated tones and arresting compositions. These sequences recall the work of directors who make every frame a painting, favoring stylized imagery over conversational realism. The result is a movie whose technical achievements—lighting, costume and camera—often outshine the plot that is meant to bind them.
The film operates largely as a two-hander, and the dynamic between the two leads determines much of its emotional heft. Michaela Coel plays Sam Anselm, an uncompromising British designer whose creative identity is steeped in bitterness and authority; she carries an acerbic intelligence and a formal severity that dominate the film’s quieter stretches. Anne Hathaway embodies the titular pop phenomenon as a figure divided between the public spectacle and private unravelling. Hathaway’s stage moments are physically committed and explosive, while her offstage presence is intentionally fragile—less a tantrum-prone diva than a human worn thin by idolization. Together the actors create sparks, but those sparks rarely cohere into a fully convincing relational narrative.
The actors’ work is one of the film’s most reliable pleasures: there’s friction, contempt, tenderness and complicated interdependence. Yet the screenplay opts for elliptical exchanges and symbolic incidents—visions, bloodied portals, a chalk circle ritual—that invite interpretation but resist concrete resolution. The film frames possession and exorcism as both literal phenomena and metaphors for the bond between performer and image-maker, but without committing to a single reading. Viewers seeking psychological depth or conventional character arcs may find the approach distancing; others who favor associative, mood-driven cinema will appreciate the ambiguity as an aesthetic choice.
Music and design operate almost as co-directors. Original electronic songs and production contributions from Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX and FKA twigs, supported by Daniel Hart‘s score, supply the film with an urgent sonic identity. The staging of the concert numbers leans into EDM-inflected textures and heavy processing of vocals, allowing Hathaway to read convincingly as a contemporary pop titan. Costuming makes an argument of its own: elaborate stage outfits—including halo-like accoutrements—underscore the film’s interest in religious iconography and the ways image circulates as worship. The drama folds in occult imagery (séances, ritual circles) that literalize creative communion into something uncanny and occasionally grotesque.
Lowery’s decision to let symbols carry much of the weight creates striking moments—a swirling mass of red fabric that feels almost animate, a seance that returns the characters to a formative night—but also produces gaps in narrative logic. The film repeatedly favors impression over exposition, leaving viewers to stitch together motive and meaning from gestures more than explanation. That approach can be rewarding when one is in the mood for cinema as sensory puzzle; it becomes frustrating when recurring plot elements (abandonment, collaborative authorship, the cost of fame) are teased but not fully explored.
Mother Mary is a movie of contrasts: dazzling surface craft set against a deliberately attenuated core. The production values, performances and design deliver memorable, sometimes dazzling sequences, but the screenplay’s reliance on atmosphere and symbol leaves the emotional stakes undernourished. For audiences drawn to visual lyricism and thematic suggestion—those who relish films that feel like modern parables about image and identity—Lowery’s film will be a feast. For viewers craving narrative clarity and sustained dramatic payoff, the film may feel like an elegant, well-made shell with little inside it.