OVERVIEW
Years after a creative partnership ended, a pop star (Anne Hathaway) on the verge of a return performance turns up unannounced at the country workshop of her former best friend and costume designer (Michaela Coel). With three days to design the dress that will reintroduce the singer to the world, the two women confront the songs, the wardrobe, and the wound that has outlasted their silence.
BACKGROUND
Between review bombing by religious fanatics upset by the lead character’s imagery, copyright noise from a real-life electrogoth duo, and a long (but planned) fourteen-month shoot due to its elaborate concert scenes, Mother Mary arrives in early 2026 skipping the festival circuit, and in a bad moment for A24. After Materialists crossed $100M globally last summer, the studio cycled through a string of underperformers (Eddington, The Legend of Ochi, Death of a Unicorn, Bring Her Back) and watched its key production partnership 2AM dissolve in November 2025. Instead of marketing the film around Hathaway, who already has a packed 2026, the studio is selling it around its auteur, the same play A24 has run with Aster, Safdie, and Song, despite Lowery not having a big fanbase. The film is also extremely personal for him, an autobiography drawn from his own back-and-forth between A24 passion projects and Disney studio gigs.
THE REVIEW
Like Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux, the film is interested in the human cost behind mega pop stars like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, artists trapped between the versions of themselves their audiences signed up for and the artistic instincts that built those audiences in the first place. The image keeps demanding to be fed, and the more it gets fed, the further it drifts from whatever made it interesting to begin with. In that sense, the film’s opening minutes do a fantastic job of portraying a first performance of the titular character, a nervous breakdown that has her rushing to see her original costume designer, and that costume designer’s reaction to seeing the singer arriving wet on her doorstep at her wits’ end. Between the cuts, the first interactions between Hathaway and Coel, and the careful staging of those sequences, the film feels like it could have ended right there, and its statement would have been made.
However, after this remarkable introduction, the subsequent scenes often do not reach the same level. The story shifts to a chamber drama between Mother Mary and Sam, where they confront old pains and regrets. The back-and-forth is intriguing, elevated by two fantastic performers operating at the top of their craft, but it always circles back to the same idea: Mother Mary chose fame and gave up her true soul.
The more interesting wrinkle is how Mary traces the rupture back to the moment Sam left. The catch is that Sam knew the singer better than anyone and was always pushing her toward a rawer, more honest version of herself, the version Mary had to repress to keep the career climbing. We hear both sides, and the film stays engaging through the hidden jabs the two throw at each other, as well as memorable sequences like Hathaway performing the song’s choreography without accompaniment while pushing past her physical limits to impress Sam. What is said underneath is not revolutionary, but the two performances carry it through, until the film tips into metaphor.
As Mother Mary begins telling her side, which involves a spiritual invocation led by Imogen (FKA Twigs, who also co-wrote the songs), the film leans on a red, floating sheet to symbolize the strain between Sam and Mary. It is visually evocative, and some shots, like Hathaway falling into an abyss while being chased by the ghostly sheet, are memorable, but the sequence adds little. The images repeat what the characters have already said, and the longer it goes, the more indulgent it becomes. It reminded me of Anemone from last year, equally self-important. By the film’s lengthy, ultra-serious conclusion, where Hilda (Hunter Schafer) narrates something that makes little sense with the straight-faced delivery of someone reciting scripture, you feel like you’ve had enough.
It is a shame, because it betrays some genuinely fantastic work from the two actresses. Hathaway flawlessly inhabits a pop star’s physicality and mannerisms, while Coel is as delightfully dry here as she was in The Christophers. The film’s best scenes are their simple back-and-forth, filled with passive-aggressive, carefully chosen words. Bina Daigeler’s costume design is equally stellar. The film didn’t need the long interludes, nor did it need the exaggerated conclusion. Like pop music, it would greatly benefit from dialing down the overproduced noise and going back to basics.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Lowery has been transparent that Mother Mary is the most personal thing he has put on screen, an autobiographical study of an artist torn between her core voice and the bigger version she has to be in public. The irony is that the film makes the same mistake the titular pop star. The personal film, the one Hathaway and Coel are giving you in the barn, is right there. Lowery keeps leaving it for the louder one.