Film Review of “Mother Mary”: Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel Create a Radiant Harmony in David Lowery’s Strange, Pop-Inspired Psychological Drama Drawn from a Divine World
According to the CinemaDrame News Agency, director David Lowery describes Mother Mary as a film about “how art can take something terrible and transform it into something beautiful,” and he knows exactly what he is talking about. The filmmaker, who first gained recognition for his low-budget independent and experimental works, later moved into more mainstream territory with larger studio projects, including Disney films that, within commercial structures, unexpectedly managed to extract genuine human emotion. This constant movement between personal cinema and studio filmmaking has made his career feel like a continuous tension between “for myself” and “for others.”
Mother Mary may be both Lowery’s most personal and most impenetrable film; a work that tries to connect these two worlds while simultaneously blurring the boundary between them. The film is a kind of experimental, musical psychological drama that turns the relationship between a pop star and her former costume designer into a collision space of memory, art, and identity—where the line between reality and metaphor constantly shifts.
In its simplest form, the story is about a very famous singer who, after many years, seeks out her former friend and collaborator—a costume designer who has since built her own place in the fashion world. The singer needs a dress for her major comeback performance, and only this designer can create it. This reunion after a decade of silence is filled with tension and emotional reckoning.
In the first half of the film, the relationship between the two women takes on the shape of a ritual of humiliation and emotional settling of scores. The pop star appears fragile and broken, facing the anger and judgment of the costume designer, a woman wounded by betrayal and abandonment during her former friend’s rise to fame. Anne Hathaway delivers a performance that feels vulnerable and restrained, while Michaela Coel portrays a sharp, judgmental figure trapped between anger and the temptation of revenge.
The details of the protagonist’s crisis are intentionally left vague, but it is clear that she has lost herself in the process of fame and now seeks a return to artistic authenticity through the only person who knew her from the beginning. The film frames their relationship as a kind of mental entanglement, where the distance between two people resembles the distance between memories rather than between individuals.
As the film progresses, it begins to resemble a kind of ritual or spiritual summoning, where past and present collapse into each other. One key scene involves a music-less rehearsal of a dance performance, which feels like the extraction of a suppressed inner force. In this moment, the body becomes a battlefield between pain, memory, and creativity.
The film constantly asks where memories go when we no longer need them. The pop star, oscillating between collapse and reconstruction, searches for meaning in art and performance—a meaning that is both deeply personal and exposed to the gaze of millions. The songs featured in the film, created with contributions from artists such as Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA twigs, greatly enhance the credibility of its world.
As the story progresses, the characters become more complex. Anne Hathaway transforms from a broken figure into a powerful icon who is simultaneously vulnerable and dominant. Michaela Coel’s character, on the other hand, changes less externally, but her inner emotional layers gradually emerge—a mixture of love, anger, and a kind of reluctant respect.
Overall, the film maintains an unstable and ambiguous tone, much like a long-lost relationship eroded by time but never fully gone. Bold costume design, dreamlike cinematography, and poetic visual effects create a space that constantly shifts between reality and imagination. Lowery deliberately inhabits this boundary, allowing the film to remain both deeply personal and open to interpretation.
In the end, the more the distance between the two characters grows, the more clearly their connection is felt. The film shows how two people can continue to affect each other’s lives even in absence. Mother Mary ultimately becomes a story about mutual possession, where the past, memory, and art become inextricably intertwined.
Rating: A-
