Anne Hathaway as Mother Mary.VVS/Supplied
Mother Mary
Written and directed by David Lowery
Starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel
Classification 14A; 112 minutes
Opens in theatres April 24
“The transubstantiation of feeling, that’s what we’re doing here,” offers Michaela Coel’s wary character, Sam Anselman, almost midway through Mother Mary, the new feature from writer-director David Lowery. It is a perfect tagline for Lowery’s esoteric psychological pop thriller, a cinematic exorcism inspired by the cognitive dissonance Lowery experienced while finishing edits on his lauded The Green Knight (2021) while also beginning work on his live action adaptation of Peter Pan & Wendy (2023).
Starring Anne Hathaway as the titular Mother Mary, a polished yet ethereal pop icon of near-mythic stature, the film opens in the aftermath of a possibly self-inflicted accident on stage – a nearly lethal event that has left her in the grips of a profound and destabilizing creative and personal crisis.
A few days before she is set to stage her long-awaited comeback, she arrives unannounced at the remote English estate of world-renowned costume designer and estranged friend, Sam (Coel), who she is convinced is the only person who can properly design a dress worthy of – and creatively integral to – her return to the stage. It’s a tense reunion that quickly unearths unattended wounds, buried resentments and an emotional power struggle between the two women.
Michaela Coel stars alongside Anne Hathaway.Eric Zachanowich/Supplied
The contradictions between the creative instincts behind a work like The Green Knight or the austere allegorical drive of Lowery’s 2017’s film A Ghost Story and the populist, IP-driven commitments that produced Peter Pan & Wendy and Pete’s Dragon (2016) seem to form the central preoccupations of Mother Mary. It is from within these tensions that the film’s narrative and thematics take root, building out these warring factions of artistic consciousness.
Bolstered by beautiful design work on the level of set, production and costuming, as well as moody and hermetic staging and cinematography, Mother Mary is an undoubtedly visually rich film. Anchored by Coel’s sharp-edged, taut performance and Hathaway’s ability to fall into the messy vulnerability of – almost, but not entirely – acquiescing to Sam’s, oft-times understandable, emotional lashings and exercises of power over the star, it’s a psychological choreography of words and memories fraught with mutual hurt materializing in ways both unguarded and defensive.
The dialogue between the pair feels like a communal excavation of their relationship and individual (and, at one point, symbiotic) artistic ambitions; the momentum of their exchanges seems almost outside of their control – it’s an intense emotional reckoning that reaches near untenable combustion upon their sudden reunion. This tension is tempered only by brief removes from their visually stark two-hander tableau to otherworldly scenes of Mother Mary performing onstage with her signature halo (the film features original songs composed by pop darlings Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff and performed by Hathaway).
It’s within this pressure cooker that Lowery introduces a haunting spectral figure that has seemingly visited both women in the wake of the dissolution of their friendship and working relationship, summoned to Mother Mary specifically after an encounter with a ouija board and its steward, Imogen (played here by a perfectly fitting, but notably underused FKA Twigs).
Writer-director David Lowery's new feature opens in theatres on April 24.Eric Zachanowich/Supplied
Existing in a form somewhere between a billowing bolt of delicate crimson fabric and a twisting rope of blood, gaseous cloud and otherwise fragile biological structures, Lowery’s ghost refuses fixed meaning, appearing before the women with a presence that is both enchanting and sinister. It’s the ultimate manifestation of the literal and figurative threads binding the women and their artistic practices, taking the film even further into the metaphorical – a mode that has threaded through much of Mother Mary and its kinetic, piercing dialogue, which, near the film’s final act, comes to feel belaboured in its lack of clarity.
Mother Mary is fixed on the alchemical nature of artmaking and the relations it nurtures (or doesn’t). And while the film is enthralling to engage with aesthetically, its refusal of more solid structuring elements bogs it down with an at times heavy-handed, slightly hollow poetics that, by the film’s ending, feels underdeveloped and all-too-esoteric. It’s a film that feels perpetually conflicted and unsure of the end game of its negotiation of artistic and personal identities.
“These metaphors are exhausting,” sighs Sam, almost midway through Mother Mary’s emotional excavation of the women’s inner worlds – it’s a sentiment that lands like an indictment of the film itself.
Special to The Globe and Mail