Writer/director David Lowery‘s latest pits Michaela Coel against Anne Hathaway in a tale about estranged creative collaborators who can’t keep themselves from falling back into each other’s orbit.
Straight off the top: Mother Mary is a talky film. It’s mostly a two-hander with Hathaway’s pop princess, Mother Mary, in the midst of a breakdown, dropping in unannounced on her former costume designer, Sam (Coel), who she hasn’t seen in years.
Her request: she needs the perfect dress for her comeback performance.
The reality? Mother Mary and Sam need some extensive talk therapy and the other one is seemingly the only one who truly understands them.
The details of Mother Mary’s distress, as well as the source of the friction between the two women, comprises the majority of the film’s runtime. But it takes a lot of time and conversation to get to the heart of the matter.
Thankfully Lowery’s dialogue is as much poetry as it is prose, and Coel, in particular makes a meal of it. Proving once again that she’s incapable of delivering a bad performance, the I May Destroy Your actress is magnetic as the jilted half of the pair, who can barely tolerate the presence of the woman whose career she helped make and was defined by.
Hathaway is also solid, though Mother Mary does spend large portions of the film in tears, or in stunned silence at how Sam responds to her. It’s much more of a reactionary role; though both women get the opportunity to shine as they launch into monologues about what they have experienced over the years. Hathaway also has a fantastic solo dance number when Sam orders her to perform the moves for her new single sans music (because Sam refuses to listen to her tracks any longer).
Music is obviously intrinsic to the film and Hathaway is believably competent as a (reported) Lady Gaga/Taylor Swift pop hybrid. We get to see select scenes of Mother Mary in concert and, much like M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap, there’s a whole EP from the fictional performer that can be heard in the film (Mother Mary: Greatest Hits). She’s also got her signature look – the halo – which Sam created and refined across multiple albums, concerts, and cover shoots; the religious-branding helped to define Mother Mary and plays into the film’s thematic preoccupations, which intersect with the supernatural in the film’s latter half.
In many ways, Lowery has crafted an intriguing genre blend. Half ghost story (think the first half of Peter Strickland’s In Fabric) and half play, Mother Mary is also extremely queer without ever labelling the relationship between Sam and Mother Mary. The text is undeniably aware of its sapphic energy; queerness is evident in every caress, in the yearning of Mary’s dance moves, in the vaginal shape of a haunting red fabric, and, notably, in the lack of male characters.
(In fact, the only other significant characters of note are Hunter Schafer as Sam’s assistant, Hila, and FKA Twigs, who makes a big splash in a memorable, gash-inducing cameo)
The focus on dialogue, interiority, and stagey interactions will a detraction for some audiences, especially if they refute the film’s tagline and go in looking for a straightforward genre text. Mother Mary is slight in that regard, though the aforementioned Twigs sequence and (low key) the film’s back half are all pretty firmly rooted in the supernatural. Lowery knows how to shoot the talky bits without compromising audience engagement, however, and there are several moments of slow motion and one dynamite transition late in the film, when Mother Mary walks from dressing room to stage and back in an unbroken take, that are incredibly visually evocative.
Mother Mary won’t be for everyone, but it is atmospheric, gorgeous, and well performed. It’s a particularly great showcase for Coel, who carries the film through the first half until the audience is suitably invested in the drama and the mystery. Mother Mary is unlike anything else in recent memory and that’s refreshing. 4/5
Mother Mary is in theaters April 24