Mother Mary Review: All the Little Monsters

There’s an unexpected resonance between Michaela Coel’s work in Mother Mary and her recent performance in The Christophers: Both are a functional two-hander, in which she plays an artist whose career has been in the constant shadow of a greater figure, only to find their need for her outweighs their own understanding. But unlike her character in Steven Soderbergh’s fine art forgery drama, whose career is wrecked by that prior intersecting, Mother Mary’s haute couture designer Sam Anselm has become an international brand. But there’s something twisting within her, some unfinished business between her and pop icon Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway). Old history has gouged and scarred them, and that scar tissue has grown between the duo, perpetually fusing them. If they were lovers, that was the least of their connections.

Not that one could imagine any real power play having gone on between them when Mary first turns up at Sam’s country manor/studio: a drenched mouse, pale and far removed from the Lady Gaga-esque figure who can fill stadiums seen in the opening moments. She is here as a supplicant asking pardon for past transgressions and begging for a dress. Not just a dress. The dress, the only dress that will do for an upcoming performance, and the dress that only Sam can make. Only Sam loathes her, the kind of spite that can come from close communion ruptured. It is a dress that will carry all their history, and something more.

This is art, as Sam puts it, as the transubstantiation of feeling, but it’s not about cloth and stitches. It’s almost an hour before the first time a pair of scissors is lifted, as writer/director David Lowery (Pete’s Dragon) isn’t interested in music or fashion, but in the agonies of collaboration. Rather than interpreting an existing mythology as he did with The Green Knight, he slowly reveals his own dark cosmology. Initially, Sam and Mary bicker through metaphors to obfuscate the truth, but then that truth crawls out of the shadows, all of its own volition. The singer and the sewer become convinced there’s a haunting presence that’s more than just the ghosts of unsettled business. Or maybe, Lowery suggests, that’s what a ghost is.

At the same time, Lowery suggests the links between gig and ritual, concert and worship, performance and exorcism. There is magick in the air, and Lowery weaves a dark spell that slowly transforms the story from a Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf-esque cerebral linguistic dance into something more intoxicating and evocative of shadowy energies, channeled through their respective artistries. The devil may wear Prada but a tasteful spirit would only ever be seen in an Anselm.

Lowery may have dealt with the uncanny in A Ghost Story, but the whole point of that film was the mundanity of the afterlife. This is a truly supernatural tale, and the storytelling transitions into his version of horror, abstract and oblique. As the idea that there’s something possessing Mary becomes more pressing, the question of their relationship becomes about who cursed who.

It’s in the final act that Lowery embraces the Catholic and Gothic grandiosity of his own conceit. He’s clearly in deep reverence of Black Swan, Suspiria, and The Red Shoes, all films that pierce the veil of witchcraft and artistry. Throughout this, Hathaway bridges the contradictions of Mary. In Sam’s chamber of wonders, she’s feral and terrified, with a wildness that reaches a crescendo in a dance to no music. Onstage, where Hathaway does her own singing for the concert footage, she carries herself with the studied and easily merchandisable fragility of the modern pop icon. Meanwhile, Coel snarls and smiles as the only person who really sees Mary. Which is, after all, exactly why the singer came on bended knee in the first place.

Mother Mary

2026, R, 112 mins. Directed by David Lowery. Starring Michaela Coel, Anne Hathaway, Hunter Schafer, FKA Twigs.

⭐⭐⭐⭐

Rating: 3.5 out of 5.

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