Mother Mary

When a global pop star breaks with Sam (Michaela Coel, "The Christophers"), the designer who created her stage persona, Sam is so emotionally shattered her grief manifests as a spirit, a Red Woman which haunts and possesses "Mother Mary."

Laura's Review: C+

It would appear that writer/director David Lowery ("A Ghost Story," "The Green Knight") has watched Peter Strickland's "In Fabric," a fellow A24 release, one time too many. While he has created an impressive pop star extravaganza of a concert experience and has two compelling leads in Coel and Anne Hathaway, his supernatural metaphor for a diseased friendship is too silly and contrived to be effective. A more straightforward narrative about star and muse may have served these actresses better.

Before the film's title sequence, we're given a brief, blurry look at video footage of what appears to be Mother Mary hanging from the rafters by her neck. We'll also hear Sam Anselm calling her a malignancy, albeit one who takes up a lot of space in her life, a former friend who made her realize how much love and hate are bound. But halfway around the world in L.A., Mother Mary, clad in a sparkly bodysuit, thigh high boots, a long blonde wig and a halo is commanding a stage singing 'Burial' amidst her backup dancers in front of an adoring audience.

The on stage confidence disappears backstage when a team gathers to fit a new costume. Suddenly we are outside London at the rambling estate and atelier of Sam Anselm, her assistant Hilda ('Euphoria's Hunter Schafer) trying to stop a bedraggled woman from entering, but Mother Mary rushes upstairs calling for the woman who has already intuited she was coming. Mother Mary declares she needs a dress, her only direction that it be 'her' and not red, but Sam is going to make her atone extensively, even as she begins sussing out her old friend and client in a long, cavernous, antique workroom.

As their history is slowly teased out, Sam will refuse to listen to the new song Mother Mary declares 'the best ever written,' stating that she stopped listening to her music long ago, but she will ask the singer to perform its accompanying dance to assess the movement needed in the garment she'll produce. What follows is such a physical expression of anguish (Hathaway trained in dance for two years for this role), Sam drops her remove to ask how she can possibly sing at the same time and suddenly these two begin to open up to each other in an attempt to heal the rift in their relationship. Unfortunately, this is also where the Red Woman comes into the story, first in Sam's recollection of her release which is at least eerily done, then from Mother Mary's point of view which includes a ridiculous seance where a friend of hers, Imogen (FKA twigs, "Honey Boy," "The Carpenter's Son"), calls up her spirit, a scene which feels disconnected from the rest of the film. That seance flashback will lead into Sam performing something that resembles a Satanic ritual to pull the spirit out of Mother Mary.

Michaela Coel is absolutely mesmerizing as she indicts her old friend on her casual dismissal while Hathaway merely looks tired, disheveled and dejected. It is an uneven matchup when Hathaway isn't singing and dancing, her Mother Mary a force performing seven original songs by Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs (we never do get to hear 'Spooky Action,' that 'best song ever written' Sam refuses to hear). People like 'Fleabag's' Sian Clifford and Kaia Gerber hang around the edges of the action without having a character to speak of, and although the Red Woman is credited as Taylor Sieve, I saw nothing but a long piece of sheer red fabric floating through the air.

Production design is a bit odd, everything from concert backstage areas to Sam's atelier looking like vast rehearsal spaces, and that pre-credit snippet we see of Mother Mary hanging doesn't make spatial sense when we see the whole event in flashback, but Bina Daigeler's ("Tár") costume design is exceptional, especially Sam's Joan of Arc inspired Mother Mary costume and the sculptural red dress (by Iris van Herpen) designed by Sam which appears to go unworn at film's end. Hair and makeup are also notable from Coel's natural twist to the contrast between Mother Mary's wigs and her natural hair (oddly, Hathaway strongly resembles Lindsay Lohan in her long blond wig).

"Mother Mary" is never boring, but ultimately too many of Lowery's choices are just too baffling to satisfy.

A24 released "Mother Mary" in NYC on 4/17/26.  It opens wide on 4/24/26.