David Lowery’s Mother Mary is all ambition, little payoff

By Staff Writer Kayla Li

In David Lowery’s Mother Mary, he teaches that to be made visible is not the same as being seen. The hands that arrange and tend and dress the beloved in something worthy of the world’s attention do not notice, in their devotion, the moment the beloved stops being a person and becomes a site. The image is not built from malice, but from reverence so total it has lost the ability to ask what the reverence costs. 

This film knows this wound well. It is a film about the making of an icon, and the human being hollowed out in the process. What it does not seem to recognize is how often it reproduces the very thing it wants to examine.

Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel) is a fashion designer who once built Mary’s (Anne Hathaway) image: the halos, the iconography, the persona the world learned to call sacred, before a bitter falling out severed both their creative partnership and whatever intimacy once existed between them. Mary returns three days before a comeback performance, asking Sam to dress her again. What follows is a two-hander between two women circling a wound neither has fully faced, set inside a vast studio space that once held their shared history, and now holds mostly its residue: Mary’s old costumes, Sam’s old sketches, the physical record of a working relationship that clearly became something more complicated than work.

Coel’s performance is extraordinary. Her face changes by degrees, warmth cooling into grief, tenderness sharpening into something sovereign and cold. She does not perform Sam’s faith so much as carry it in the reverence of her hands when she works. To watch her tend to Mary is to watch a devotion that has lost the seam between love and the need to keep shaping what it loves. When the camera stays with her, Coel executes precisely the film’s vision — a portrayal of consuming, self-erasing devotion — that the rest of the movie only manages to gesture at.

Hathaway is more uneven, though never uninteresting. Mary’s character feels hollow, but that hollowness rarely deepens into something legible. She is most convincing when she is simply observed, and least convincing when the script forces her into lines that flatten her further. When Sam asks Mary to describe her new music, what would inform the costume designs, Mary offers that it “might be the best song ever written in the history of songs.” The joke is on celebrity ego in theory, but in practice it is a surface-level punchline — and Hathaway, an actor capable of far more, is given nothing to play beneath it.

Visually, the film is far more precise than its script. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo keeps the camera close, and while that intimacy can’t rescue the film’s weaker dialogue scenes, it creates something alive in the sequences where words fall away — particularly a surreal encounter with a ghost rendered in deep, arterial red, the film’s single most striking image. These visual high points offer a glimpse of what Mother Mary could have been: a film that communicates its ideas about image and devotion through sensation rather than symbol. That it only arrives there occasionally makes the stretches of flat dialogue feel longer by contrast.

The first half of this film is, frankly, a drag. Lowery has said he wanted “something simple — a movie with just two actors in a room having a long heart to heart… a really gentle filmmaking experience” in an interview with IndieWire.  Simple it is not. Interesting it frequently isn’t either. The relationship between Mary and Sam is referenced more than it is felt. The screenplay gives these women very little of actual substance to circle, and without Coel’s acting doing the work the writing cannot, large stretches are simply waiting dressed up as hollow contemplation.

These shortcomings might have been forgivable if the film understood its subject better. Real popstars do not disappear three days before a comeback and place themselves wordlessly into someone else’s hands, waiting to be told who they are. The film is not interested in the actual mechanics of fame — which would be fine, except that its vague fantasy of pop stardom undermines the very argument it is trying to make. You cannot critique the violence of celebrity image-making while remaining incurious about how that image is actually constructed. And Mother Mary is incurious. Joyless, humorless, so committed to its own solemnity that it forgets self-awareness is not the enemy of depth. In fact, it is often what depth requires. The songs, written by Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff, and FKA twigs among others, gesture toward a Mary the film itself never lets us see — swirling, architectural, and built for spaces larger than a barn. As a director, Lowery overemphasizes the dialogue when the music has already done the work of telling us who Mary is.

The symbolism follows the same pattern: its Christian imagery is so relentless it tips, at times, toward self parody, the kind of A24 film that mistakes density for depth. Every element is pre-labeled, already pointing at its own significance. The film establishes its iconography as metaphors, asks the audience to receive it as allegory, and then wonders why neither lands. Allegory does not work through accumulation, it works through what is withheld. Mother Mary is a film almost entirely consumed by its own costuming — which, given that it is a film about exactly that, is either a sophisticated irony or a damning one. It is difficult to tell which Lowery intended, and increasingly difficult to care.

Coel’s performance and the ghost sequence are the film’s few sacred moments, and Mother Mary does not deserve them. Lowery has constructed a cathedral so ornate it obscures the people inside it. Whether that is intentional or not becomes beside the point. The result is the same. One tagline for Mother Mary manages to summarize the whole experience: “Not a ghost story,” a reference to A Ghost Story, Lowery’s far better earlier film. Mother Mary is self-serious to the point of hollow. It’s hard to imagine who wouldn’t prefer it. 

Grade: C-