Mother Mary review – Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel get lost in ridiculous pop star drama | film

FOr a certain segment of pop music fans, the cult of divas comes with a high tolerance for their unique flavor of psychobabble. So when Anne Hathaway, as the titular singer in David Lurie’s Mother Mary, announced that her new single Spooky Action was about Einstein’s “transference of emotions,” I ignored the snores of those in the theater next to me. Finally, I thought, thinking back fondly to the time when Lady Gaga talked about her music as a reverse Warhol blast: a pop star unafraid to stoop to high-concept bullshit. My generosity quickly faded when I began to realize that Mother Mary—both the character and the movie—was missing a crucial ingredient for any modern pop star worth his salt: self-awareness.

Mother Mary is a top-notch musician searching for a comeback after a mysterious event puts her out of commission. She seems… haunted, and is having a fashion emergency, unable to find anything to wear for her impending return to the stage. Three days before her big appearance, she shows up in the rain at costume designer Sam Anselm’s (a delightful Michaela Coel) gothic mansion, looking like a mouse stuck in a monsoon, begging for an outfit that “looks like me.” Sam has evolved a lot since she was Mother Mary’s fashion partner, and perhaps her lover behind closed doors as well. In fact, she absolutely hates the pop star. “You’re a carcinogen, you’re a tumor,” Sam says in an amusingly ominous voiceover. “Yellow is rising.”

Despite all this, Sam feels a vaguely supernatural attraction to Mary and accepts the challenge of designing a new stage costume for her. With a flurry of fabric and a few scraps of scissors, Sam sets to work searching for Mary from the bundles of chiffon she has stashed in a ramshackle barn for just such a purpose. Mary says: Everything is fair, except for the color red. She was being chased by a demon that was exactly that color. And so it sets the tone for a preposterous but consistently stylish two hours with some great acting amid the creaking and howling winds in the barn, extravagant flashbacks to high-octane Marie performances, a thrilling immersion in body horror, as well as some truly stunning visual moments that combine Dali’s surrealism with the high-tech sheen of the modern pop stage.

The last time Hathaway starred in a musical (2012’s Les Misérables) she walked away with an Oscar. I can’t quite see similar awards being given for Laurie’s often incomprehensible style experimentation, but she is convincing as a major pop girl in flashback scenes, performing gorgeous choreography with backup dancers and bathed in blue lights for a serpentine routine to the branches of FKA My Mouth Is Lonely For You. (The soundtrack also features contributions from Charli xcx and Jack Antonoff.) Since most of the film focuses on charged conversations between Mary and Sam in the designer’s “Miss Havisham”-like barn, it appears that a significant portion of the film’s $100 million budget went into creating its arena scenes. Compared to the pop party scenes in recent films like Trap and Smile 2 (both of which got an A for effort in my opinion), Mother Mary’s pop skill is in a class of its own.

While Hathaway plays the flashier role, the more cerebral Cowell recedes from the picture: Samha is every bit as icy and imperious as the Dickensian character who defines her name. As Mary, she speaks as if she’s swallowed a philosophy textbook, but she gets the best lines and finds pockets of humor in Laurie’s somewhat strict script. It’s a necessary foil for the very serious Hathaway, who plays Mother Mary as if she were Hedda Gabler. To be fair, the annoying characters in the script don’t give the actor much to work with. At one point, Sam asked Mary if she “wanted to look like a knife,” to which Mary replied: “I want to have a point of view.” She wonders if Laurie finds himself asking the same thing.

It’s a relief when the camera moves away from the existential discussions between Mary and Sam in the barn and toward the supporting cast. FKA Twigs throws herself into a semi-erotic tango with Mary in bizarre flashbacks involving a Ouija board, while Fleabag’s Sian Clifford has some funny reaction shots as Mary’s annoyed manager. Other popular cast members are underutilized: Hunter Schafer’s role is unnecessary, and Kaia Gerber is barely given a chance to show off the comedic timing she admired in Bottoms.

Adding to the frustration is the fact that Mother Mary gracefully avoids a great deal of the difficult issues staring her in the face. For a film billed as a “psychological pop thriller,” it has a strange coyness about its central relationship with queerness, which reads as quite prescient in an age of punk pop. You may also find yourself wondering what personal events led Coel’s Sam, who is described as working-class in the film’s production notes but speaks with a regal RP accent, to see fashion as a suitable armor for Joan of Arc. Perhaps a smarter film could have found an interesting reversal between Hathaway, the movie star, and pop icon mother Mary, and found space to examine how decades of stardom can destroy one’s inner psyche.

Lowry’s film can dazzle. But in the words of one of the director’s obvious references, many will discover his sources of inspiration Everything is fine. A sweeping shot of Mary backstage between performances would be a nod to The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover for any college film, in an ill-advised choice of cluttered film that takes leagues away from Peter Greenaway’s wonderfully twisted fashion fantasy. And an early scene where reverse shots of the main characters’ faces fade into each other is somewhat on the nose as a nod to Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in the 1966 film Persona. Ingmar Bergman, Laurie is not.

As the screening ended, I heard one guest describe Mother Mary as “a great gay movie.” On paper, it has something going for it: a glamorous cast, a flirt at its center, and a ghost who appears to be made of shimmering fabric. If only the brooding-faced Lowery had any amount of knowledge that could elevate its hodgepodge of ideas into a cult classic. Which is ironic, considering it’s a movie about a dress.