The relationship between pop stardom and religious worship has rarely been so literal as it is in “Mother Mary,” the new film from the writer and director David Lowery (“Ghost Story,” “The Green Knight”). The titular pop star, played by Anne Hathaway, is awash in religious iconography. There’s her name, of course, and the titles of albums and songs that namedrop the Magnificat, the Sacred Heart, the Holy Spirit. Ornate golden halos adorn her head during concerts; one outfit includes an iron sleeve of armor, invoking Joan of Arc. Her lyrics combine religious longing with romantic desire: broken hearts transfigured into sacred ones.
But fame is a fickle sort of faith. One day the world is worshiping at your feet. The next, they’re mounting you on a cross and turning to a new idol. “Mother Mary” can be an elusive experience, sometimes richer in atmosphere than narrative sense, but that idea comes across clearly: the punishing cost of pop divinity.
We encounter Mary awaiting resurrection. Following a traumatic mid-concert accident (or, possibly, suicide attempt), she has retreated from the limelight. Now she’s planning a comeback, which she seems to need and dread in equal measure. But she also longs for “clarity,” wanting to return to some essential part of herself that she lost in her rise to fame. That requires a return to basics, and a reunion with her oldest friend and collaborator, fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Once a powerful duo, the two have been estranged for years following a slow, quiet falling-out.
St. Anselm was exiled twice for his friction with English kings, and Sam similarly has been cast out from Mother Mary’s royal court—although, in her case, it was at least half by choice. She is brilliant and emotionally astute, but also prickly. When Mary turns up at her door, penitently asking for a new dress to accompany her coming reinvention, Sam wastes no time in putting the screws to her. But in the end she agrees, perhaps out of lingering affection or maybe just so she can watch her old friend squirm.
Sam refers to her creative process as “the transubstantiation of feeling,” making emotion visible through bolts of fabric and judicious stitches. The two women sequester themselves in the old barn that Sam uses as a workshop, alone except for Sam’s assistant Hilda (Hunter Schaefer, who largely flits around the margins of the film before delivering a brief stunner of a monologue at the end). As they delve into the chilling truth behind Mary’s accident, they begin to realize that their severed connection is still alive.
Or maybe the better word is undead: The breakup of their friendship manifests as an (actual) crimson specter of rage and heartbreak that is devouring Mary from the inside out. “Mother Mary” reveals itself to be an exorcism story. Instead of a demon, Mary and Sam must exorcise their own history, the scabbed accumulation of resentments and hurts. Mary comes seeking resurrection, but what she really needs is reconciliation.
The film is essentially a chamber piece, only rarely leaving Sam’s workshop for digressions into memory or vision. Hathaway and Coel prevent it from ever feeling too stagey: Their back-and-forth is electric, and they are enthusiastically committed to Lowery’s acrobatic dialogue. “Mother Mary” was distributed by A24, the studio that has become synonymous with “elevated” horror—light on traditional scares, big on spooky externalized metaphors for trauma. But even before the aforementioned crimson specter shows up, the film is playing in rich emotional territory.
Like Mother Mary’s music, the conflict between Mary and Sam is both personal and spiritual. If pop star worship is idolatrous, Sam wants something with a more Christian connotation: a personal relationship with her god. She did have that, once, when Mary was a friend, collaborator and muse. But as Mary’s star rose, Sam lost her to the world. Sam goes to a concert and realizes that she has become just a face in the crowd: Mary is singing to her, but only because is singing to everyone. Sam doesn’t want the amorphous warmth of universal love: She wants a love that is specific, vibrant and hers.
These emotions are so potent because I believe in the characters expressing them. But while Sam and Mary feel fully drawn, Mother Mary—the icon herself—never completely comes into focus. There’s inherent power in combining sacred imagery with celebrity (real-life celebrities do it often enough), but in this regard “Mother Mary” never goes beyond the surface.
Pop stars have mythologies as complex as any superhero, an intricate metanarrative of symbols and callbacks and shibboleths. A Taylor Swift fan applies a host of meanings to the number 13, or a snake emoji; these are articles of faith, a shared ritual language that marks you as part of a bigger community. But Mother Mary is all aesthetics: aside from those halos, we never get a sense of who Mother Mary is, or why she’s able to inspire such widespread worship.
What does all of that Marian imagery mean to her fans? For that matter, what does it mean to her? We get the sense that it means something to Sam (who makes an offhand reference to a religious upbringing and was, we learn, the originator of the halo motif). And we know it means something to Lowery, a lapsed Catholic who told America in 2017: “I no longer see myself as a devout Catholic in any shape, way or form. Nonetheless, that’s part of who I am…. I know those undercurrents are there whether I try to put them there or not.”
But its meaning to Mary remains unclear. Is it aspirational: Did she chase stardom in an intentional bid for immortality? Is it ironic juxtaposition, like Madonna’s various Marian allusions or Sabrina Carpenter’s “Feather” video? Musically, her songs are meant to remind you of latter-day Taylor Swift, but her lyrics are darker, haunting, more comparable to Lady Gaga or FKA twigs (who wrote a song for the film and appears in a small but pivotal role). Maybe this confused image is meant to evoke Mary’s own lack of artistic clarity; but in practice, it feels like half-baked writing.
Lowery is better at depicting the costs of divinity than its attractions. Certainly we see it in Hathaway’s brittle performance, but Lowery expresses it best through visual storytelling, specifically two dance sequences. In the first, Mary performs her planned choreography for her comeback without music: a visceral, violent routine that looks disturbingly like possession. The second is a sort of dream ballet, in which we watch Mary repeatedly ascend and descend stage steps: tall and glorious on the way up, staggering and wrung out on the way down. As Taylor Swift once sang: “It’s hell on earth to be heavenly.”
“Mother Mary” is in theaters now.
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