Mother Mary is a film that’s probably going to be a miss for a lot of people. It’s a bit messy, with a gossamer thin narrative that’s more gestural than structural, but it’s nonetheless very beautiful, a high concept two-hander that gives both of its leading ladies something to really sink their teeth into. The film takes place over the course of a single night when internationally famous pop diva Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) goes to the fashion house of her former best friend and stylist, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). For the first act, the film seems like it’s going to be a fairly straightforward drama, a kind of stage play about a woman seeking out the one person in all the world who despises her more than any others but who also has the most unique perspective to understand her. Sam’s resentment for Mary is clearly deep, while Mary’s public image has been tarnished by a very public embarrassment that there’s some evidence might have been a suicide attempt, and the first thirty minutes set up the promise that these events will be teased out over the rest of the runtime. 

I was perfectly content to watch the film that I thought I was going to get, watching two powerhouses bare their souls and their grief to one another and to those of us in the audience. The film caught me off guard when it took a turn toward the spooky as the second act opens, as each woman reveals that in the wake of their schism, both had an experience with something inexplicable. The same night that Sam realized she had come to be on the outside of Mary’s life, looking in from a distance, she witnessed some kind of phantasm that seemed to have left her body via an open wound; later, when Mary hires an occultist to do some sleepover witchcraft on the night of her birthday, that same ephemeral thing makes contact with her, setting her literal and metaphorical fall in motion. Visually, the film was beautifully shot and sumptuous from the beginning, but as Mary and Sam relate these anecdotes, things get a little more surreal and we get to see the imagery thereof elevated and re-enacted in real time. Sam opens the doors of her “Mrs. Haversham” barn/studio, and the camera pushes in to follow her into the crowd at Mary’s show; Mary and Sam walk over to a lavish hotel room that has appeared like a giant set in Sam’s space, and then the fourth wall closes around the action. It’s wonderful stuff, very stylish in a way that feels theatrical but effortless. 

David Lowery, who wrote and directed the film, has proven to have a masterful hand at this kind of thing. The final act of A Ghost Story (as much as that film could be said to have “acts”) was similar; as the point of view ghost loses touch with all his earthly ties, time “skips” so that he moves from the house we’ve been haunting with him to a lonely office building that eventually rises on the same place. Brandon wasn’t a fan, but I was; it remains to be seen whether the implementation of this same transitional environmental storytelling technique will be more effective this time around for other viewers. At the very least, Mother Mary is a film about dwelling in a way that doesn’t try one’s patience the way A Ghost Story did (for others). Where I expect this film to lose most general audience members is in just how literal the metaphorical ghost becomes while the film itself leaves the metaphor itself rather ambiguous. No one gets up and gives a big speech about what trauma the amorphous ghost represents; no one names “grief” or “resentment” as monsters that can be overcome with forgiveness and reconciliation. The film’s choice to leave one with questions and different potential interpretations is going to raise the dander of people who can’t abide ambiguity in their art and need something concrete and easy to grasp. Some of the people for whom that element is a feature and not a flaw may find the way that the metaphor becomes explicit off-putting. 

I was on board for all of that, utterly caught up in the whole thing. The only thing that didn’t quite work for me was the music. Thrillers centering around major pop acts have become a bit of a trend lately (see: Smile 2, Trap, Lurker), and I often find the musical acts therein to be virtually indistinguishable from the radio pop hits that I hear at the club (or, more common at my old age, the grocery store). We get to hear a few of Mother Mary’s hits, and none of them really have any staying power; there’s a not-quite-fully realized bit of religiosity to her music, as her stage name evokes Catholicism (as does Sam’s surname), one of her songs is called “Holy Spirit,” and she has a stigmata-like wound at one point, but it never comes together in a meaningful way. The connection I found myself thinking of most while watching this wasn’t Madonna or Lady Gaga, but last year’s The Testament of Ann Lee, because Mother Mary’s body of work was as monotonous and repetitive as that film’s hymnal remixing. When we talked about Lurker on the podcast last year, there was some dismissal of the film’s bedroom lo-fi tracks as forgettable, but I’ve found myself returning to “Snakes in the Garden” quite a lot since last September, and I don’t think I’ll ever feel the need to revisit Mother Mary’s “Burial” or “Dark Cradle.” 

The songs were written by FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film) with some arrangements by celebrity producer Jack Antonoff. I’m ambivalent about FKA Twigs (if I’ve ever heard more than one of her songs to completion, I wasn’t aware of it) and generally positive about Antonoff’s work with his band Bleachers, and Hathaway has demonstrated a lovely singing voice in the past. Nevertheless, whatever their individual talents, what coalesced on screen was unremarkable. The scene in which Hathaway, in a modest space, performs the silent interpretive dance of her stage choreography for her newest song blows every one of the on-stage performances out of the water. What really makes this movie shine is Coel. She’s absolutely excellent here, delivering my favorite performance of the year so far. It’s nuanced and layered, and worth the price of admission alone. It won’t work for everyone, but will definitely resonate with some.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond