David Lowery has never lacked ambition, and so the North Texas product aims for a great many things with Mother Mary. His latest film means to be a study of a friendship suffocated by one person’s global fame, a body-horror exercise like The Substance, a commentary on pop-music megastardom, a metaphysical meditation on the afterlife, a story about a fashion designer making a dress under a tight deadline, and an evocation of what Taylor Swift’s Eras tour would have looked like to someone tripping balls on bad shrooms. The film only succeeds at perhaps that last one, though its nightmarish qualities make it way more interesting than the other movie about a pop star coming out this week.
Our story begins on a rain-soaked afternoon when pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) shows up unannounced and bedraggled at the English countryside atelier of Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), her former best friend and costumer. More than 10 years after she fell or jumped from a suspended piece of a concert stage, Mary is preparing a comeback. She hates all the dresses that her people have made for her tour, so she comes crawling back to Sam to design and make her a new garment, giving her a bit more than 72 hours to do that before Mary’s first concert date begins.
Mary had already severed ties with Sam before her fall, and now that Sam has built her own fashion reputation in the interim, she’s willing to make Mary beg for her help. All right, but it leads to pages’ worth of overwritten dialogue from Lowery with Sam maundering about the burdens of living in a celebrity’s shadow. Oddly, Coel is currently co-starring in another movie that essentially contains two actors, and Steven Soderbergh’s The Christophers (which is now playing in Dallas) has much more to say about an artist reckoning with the cost of their fame.
The movie does jerk to life when Mary performs her choreography for Sam. Rather than a dance double, it’s clearly Hathaway gyrating violently and throwing herself to the floor, and an alarmed Sam asks, “How are you supposed to sing while doing that?” Besides showcasing Hathaway’s remarkable performance, the scene allows the movie to turn away from Sam’s passive-aggressive response to Mary’s brokenness. Mother Mary’s weirdness, like Lowery’s in general, doesn’t always catch, but it is responsible for some of their most memorable moments.
Elsewhere, flashbacks take place on what are clearly sets adjoining Sam’s workshop (with our protagonists witnessing the actions of their past selves), and the ghost manifests itself as a large sheet of red fabric. Mary’s follow-up story about seeing the same ghost is re-created on a bare black soundstage à la Under the Skin, as well as on a packed concert stage that would be at home in Smile 2. Lowery’s film references range from The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant to Moulin Rouge! to In Fabric, and these make the movie fun for cinephiles like me.
If only the movie’s music were on the same level. Mother Mary is imagined as a star who presents herself in angelic costumes replete with halos while singing dark, morbid lyrics about love grown toxic, a fresh idea that costume designer Bina Daigeler does more with than Lowery. For all the superstar-level talent penning the music (including Jack Antonoff, Charli xcx, and FKA twigs — the latter also appears in the movie as a fan who summons the ghost into Mother Mary’s life), songs such as “Burial” and “Blue Flame” fall well short of what they promise.
Although the film looks good, Lowery has his eye on so many balls at once that nothing comes together. Mary’s final, belated apology to Sam for ditching her feels like a perfunctory ending, and the movie’s supernatural moments fail to instill us with either wonder or horror. Lowery’s talent behind the camera remains everywhere in evidence, and I’m not about to suggest that he needs to go back to his roots like Mother Mary does. This film feels very much like him. It also leaves the feeling of a substandard pop album by an artist who can do better.
Mother Mary
Starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel. Written and directed by David Lowery. Rated R.
