Recommendations of the Editorial team
She’s a little bit Gaga, a little bit Dua, a little bit Doja and Charli. She’s very much Madonna – the type of mega-monolithic music superstar who could easily devote entire world tours to her various eras. She is an icon, both in the modern sense and – given her penchant for those heavily influenced by Catholicism Haute Couture – in the original sense of the word. Some would say she is Mother. To her millions of fans, she is Mother Mary: chart-topping singer and channel for the divine experience called epic arena pop ballads.
And right now Mary (Anne Hathaway) needs a dress. A special one. Desperate times call for desperate measures – so this dance-pop icon suddenly finds herself on the doorstep of the last place in the world where she’s welcome. Much of Mother Mary’s look – as important to her reign as her music – comes from the vision of a single employee: fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Together they created the persona that would become a global phenomenon. Then Sam was dropped because Mary wanted something “new.” It broke her heart and messed with her mind. She retired to a large English country estate.
That was a decade ago. Sam is now preparing for a big exhibition of his work. And Mary, who had what we’ll call an “unfortunate incident” during a concert that went viral, is back in touch. The singer has booked a big comeback performance. Whether or not it will be Mary’s final blessing to the masses, the dress someone else made for her just isn’t any good, and she needs a new one from Sam as soon as possible. “It was all wrong,” says Mary by way of explanation. “That’s not a dress at all,” replies her former friend after seeing a photo of it. Nevertheless, she will create something new for the star – a stage costume that is also a cold revenge.
Surreal, idiosyncratic, wonderful
That’s the starting point of David Lowery’s “Mother Mary” – a mixture of psychological drama, fashion-conscious A24 horror and solid pop star nightmare that, on paper, sounds like the stuff from which Ryan Murphy would distill several seasons of juicy camp theater entertainment. However, the gap between this description and the surreal, personally expressionistic film on screen could hardly be greater. “Weird” is such a derogatory adjective for things that you don’t understand right away, or for complex works that openly display their peculiarities. But the writer-director behind “The Green Knight” and “A Ghost Story” has taken the most accessible subject imaginable – stratospheric pop stardom – and turned it into something wonderfully, wonderfully weird. Not even the original songs by Jack Antonoff, Charli The hit parade can remain stolen. This story of two creatives settling unfinished business is one hell of a headshot.
After putting Coel’s rumbling, unwavering resistance and Hathaway’s troubled, unstoppable force on a collision course, the film unleashes the former on the latter with a mix of caustic exchanges, passive-aggressive comments disguised as curiosity, and compliments that cut to the bone. In Sam’s studio, a converted barn, the two dig up old wounds and try to create some new ones. The first half is more or less a two-person piece: Sam channels her pain into sketches for a potential, outrageous “hate dress” – and occasionally goes for the jugular, while Mary stoically takes every verbal physical blow. This is what the power dynamic looks like. Whatever seems like compassion turns out to be a knife.
It’s no coincidence that the first thing we see in “Mother Mary” is the title character approaching the stage and preparing for an elaborate number – while offscreen we hear Sam railing against her former employer and close confidante: “You’re a carcinogen. You’re a carcinogen. You’re a carcinogen.” tumor.” It goes without saying that Coel is just as gifted as an actress as she is as a writer – just watch “The Christophers”, especially in a local cinema – and hardly anyone can master bitingly funny dialogue with such variety and verve as she can. It’s further proof that the “I May Destroy You” star is a sui generis generational talent is. Hathaway, on the other hand, relies on the physicality of her pop star on the verge of collapse. There is a moment when Mary, who is not allowed to sing her new single, has to dance wordlessly to convey its feeling. A high-energy sequence, punctuated by punches and bumps against a hard floor, it delivers the same thrills as car chases and bar brawls on screen.
Witching hour in the fashion studio
By the way, the song we never hear is called “Spooky Action” – an inside joke and at the same time a clue to where “Mother Mary” is ultimately headed. For a while, the film is content to be a chatty new addition to the canon of Gothic fashion parables – a genre that runs from the 1945 French drama “Falbalas” to “Phantom Thread.” In fact, this second title could have been a good alternative name for Lowery’s eerie scare show, especially after it switches from cinematic costume design fetishism (the work of costume designer Bina Daigeler cannot be praised enough) to a more unsettling, discomfort-inducing approach. A few minor characters – including Hunter Schafer’s pushy assistant and Kaia Gerber’s entourage hanger-on – flit around on the sidelines as the two main characters exchange blows. Shortly after the halfway point, the film mutates into something close to an unofficial three-person play.
Specifically: The last time Sam saw Mary play, she got an inexplicable toothache. She later awakens to see something called “the Red Woman” – a billowing mass of bright red material floating out of her door. And here’s where it gets weird (yes, that word again): Mary saw the Red Woman too. At a post-show séance in Dublin, a fan (FKA Twigs) summons a ghost; the presence uses a stigmata in Mary’s palm as an entrance to her soul. That could also have been the trigger for that viral “incident” at the concert. Someone mentioned earlier that creation is “the transubstantiation of feelings” – and now that sea of bad blood between the two has transubstantiated into something sinister. What else is left to do except an exorcism?
After the film shifts gears into spooky action and good old-fashioned horror, “Mother Mary” plunges headfirst into a giallo-soaked frenzy – and that’s where the film either loses you or works its way into your psyche like a malevolent ghost. Lowery reaches for something beyond the boundaries of genre films, zany character studies, and high-concept fashion dramas—and when he and his cast actually capture that desired frequency, it’s jarring and disturbing in a way that’s hard to put into words. A certain amount of trust is required. But for anyone who believes that films can get into your head and under your skin in ways that sometimes defy description – touching on the same transcendent state that great pop music creates, that feeling of momentarily floating into another, dizzying space – this is it. It’s not the film you think you’re seeing when you walk into the cinema. Thank God for that.
