‘Mother Mary’ Review: Anne Hathaway Sings and Dances Her Way Through David Lowery’s Half-Formed Horror Fable

I finished watching Mother Mary hours ago and I’m still not entirely sure what David Lowery was trying to do here. He’s a filmmaker whose work has always interested me, someone who has made movies in very different styles and genres, from fantasy drama (A Ghost Story) and westerns (The Old Man & the Gun) to family films (Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy) and even medieval adventure (The Green Knight). In all of them, he has managed to combine a fairly classical narrative drive with some very distinctive personal flourishes. One might think Mother Mary is attempting something similar: a horror movie presented as a psychodrama about the relationship between two friends who have fallen out of touch. But it doesn’t really work as that. Nor does it work the other way around. It’s a conceptual proposition in search of something to contain it, some larger meaning.

While watching it, I thought more than once that the only way a movie like this could really hold together would be if it were presented as a companion piece to an album by some major pop star, a series of visuals (what we used to call music videos, only presented in a more conceptual way) built around an artist, the kind of thing that gets projected onstage or released on social media as part of a promotional campaign. But as a movie on its own, removed from any connection to another “product,” there’s a feeling that something isn’t there, or is missing, or simply doesn’t work. A meaning, a coherence, a theme. These are moments in search of an impact, an atmosphere in search of a plot, and a long series of conversations in search of a subject.

Anne Hathaway plays the Mother Mary of the title, a pop diva somewhere between Lady Gaga and Charli xcx (who co-wrote some of the songs heard here with Jack Antonoff), a massive pop star whose stage persona has a touch of mysticism and religious imagery, halo and all. In crisis, Mary (or Mother, I’m not sure what she calls herself) goes to see a fashion designer named Sam Anselm (the creator and star of I May Destroy You, Michaela Coel) and asks her to design a dress for her to wear while performing her new song, which she considers not only the best song of her career but “the best song ever.” It won’t be easy. There are only four days left before the show and, even worse, Sam wants nothing to do with her.

Little by little, in a structure that is largely theatrical until about the halfway point, we learn that Sam, who started working with the singer at the beginning of her career, 25 years ago, wants nothing to do with Mary after she replaced her with other designers a decade ago. She has stopped listening to her music, stopped going to her shows and, with considerable effort, removed her from her mind. But Mary shows up crying, soaking wet and apologizing over and over again, so Sam agrees to create something she can wear. The almost therapeutic conversations between the two are ostensibly meant to help the intense Sam —with those eyes and those cheekbones, it’s impossible for Coel not to be intense— figure out what kind of dress Anne wants: no red, something that represents “clarity,” something that sums up her career, etc., etc.

Up to that point, more or less, everything is in order. We have a movie presented in an almost theatrical fashion, essentially a conversation between two estranged friends, interspersed with scenes —both onstage and inside the warehouse Sam uses as her atelier, where most of the film takes place— in which Hathaway gets to show off her abilities and her commitment to singing and dancing. But little by little, through some highly symbolic flashbacks, Lowery starts introducing a more fantastical element into the story, one that soon turns into something spiritual, with séances to contact the dead, red fabrics that seem to come alive and a pair of scissors that, for some reason, are treated as keys that may or may not be used to open doors.

Lowery makes a rather abrupt leap into more overtly fantastical territory and, from that point on, the movie becomes little short of inexplicable. It feels as if the filmmaker/screenwriter has attached a half-formed horror movie to this conversation, without ever being entirely convinced that this is the direction he should take to deal with the story of these two former friends trying to figure out whether or not they can reconcile. Mary has had a major breakdown during a show in Dublin following a strange encounter with a fan (played by FKA twigs, who also wrote some of the film’s songs) and has been deeply affected by the experience. Something similar has happened to Sam. And the two situations are connected in a way that, according to Lowery, has something to do with Einstein’s notion of quantum entanglement. Or something along those lines.

Where it’s going and what any of it is supposed to mean is difficult to say. Along the way, Lowery offers some striking but overly elaborate sequences of Hathaway singing and dancing onstage, giving the movie a look reminiscent of the videos of certain pop artists who favor a denser, darker aesthetic. FKA twigs’ lyrics, in fact, have quite a few things in common with those of the protagonist, particularly in the way they connect religion, femininity and mysticism. Maybe that’s where one needs to look more closely to decipher the path Mother Mary wants the viewer to take. Outside of that, what remains is a strange reunion between two “frenemies” that gets considerably weirder than it needs to when one of them decides that the best way to solve their problems is to summon the spirits — and some colorful flying fabrics.