A compact, unsettling film where Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel confront fame, artistry and memory
The latest film from David Lowery, released by A24, arrives as a small-scale, deliberately odd work that resists easy labels. At its center is Mother Mary, a figure played by Anne Hathaway, who reappears in the life of an old collaborator, Sam, portrayed by Michaela Coel. What unfolds is less a conventional plot and more a compressed theatrical encounter: two professionals negotiating past favors, creative debts and emotional wounds inside a single, mutable space. Lowery’s history with genre experiments—seen previously in titles like The Green Knight and A Ghost Story—informs the film’s willingness to borrow from fantasy, performance pieces and haunting imagery without committing to any one category.
From the outset the movie reads like a staged piece rather than a typical screen drama: most action occurs in Sam’s airy design studio where a private reunion quickly turns into a series of confrontations and revelations. Sam once crafted Mary’s iconic look, a halo-like crown referenced inside the film, and the request for a new dress for an upcoming performance sets the domestic argument into motion. Instead of expanding to multiple locations, Lowery keeps the camera close and lets physical space transform to register memory, concert footage and private rituals. The result is a film that feels compact and intentionally artful, asking viewers to follow theatrical logic more than cinematic convention.
One of the film’s most striking choices is the way it integrates flashbacks and concert sequences into the present-day set. Rather than cutting away in the usual cinematic fashion, Lowery allows objects and set pieces in Sam’s studio to shift and reconfigure, so that a backstage dressing room, a concert stage or a bathroom can slide into view as if onstage scenery. This technique makes memory literal: the past is not merely shown, it is arranged and rearranged in front of us. The approach favors two-hander dynamics and heightens the sensation that the movie is a filmed play, a conscious manipulation of theatrical devices to probe intimacy, power and the logistics of creative labor.
The flashbacks operate less as explanatory devices and more like choreographed beats. When Mary performs without recorded accompaniment, the scene reads like a rehearsal or a ritual rather than a conventional concert number, and the silence calls attention to bodies, breathing and movement. Lowery’s choice to emphasize physical staging—how characters stand, circle and obstruct one another—serves as a narrative method: arguments shift not only through language but through placement. The film uses these choices to convey long-standing resentments and unsaid compromises, letting spatial changes speak as clearly as dialogue.
Although the film contains surreal violence and a supernatural presence that could be read as a ghost, it rarely wants you to be simply frightened. Instead, the spectral intrusions function as metaphor, prompting reflections on celebrity, bodily autonomy and creative consumption. The work resists being labeled a musical despite original pop songs performed by the lead; it likewise refuses the conventions of body horror even when it flirts with grotesque imagery. Lowery’s intention is to keep interpretation open: some viewers will see commentary on the cost of performance, others will read it as a meditation on inspiration and theft. That deliberate ambiguity is central to the film’s provocation.
Anchoring the film are two performances that trade tension and grace. Anne Hathaway alternates between vulnerability and a magnetic, rehearsed command, while Michaela Coel delivers sharp, rhetorical lines with a physical precision that makes the studio feel populated by professional craft. The soundtrack is populated by contributions from contemporary pop and electronic artists, including Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs, the latter appearing briefly in a memorable séance-like flashback. The songs are convincing as pop artifacts within the film’s world; one collaborator’s distinctive production style does, at times, leap forward in texture, offering comic contrast amid the film’s darker moods.
Lowery’s film also stakes a clear claim on its cinematic forebears: it ultimately reads as a modern, postmodern riff on Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, investigating the mania and bodily cost of performance. Fans of Lowery’s earlier work may find this morphological leap familiar—his tendency to blur genre lines is present—and yet the film will certainly divide audiences who desire tidy resolutions. For viewers willing to accept a stagey, elliptical piece, Mother Mary rewards attention with dense metaphors, striking imagery and two committed lead turns. It is, in short, a film that behaves like a theater piece filmed for cinema: intimate, theatrical and deliberately unsettling.