‘Mother Mary’ Review: Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel in Pop Melodrama

Merciful Mother Mary, deliver us from evil. Or from whatever this risibly self-serious metaphysical nonsense about performance and possession, creation and exorcism, aims to be. David Lowery is an adventurous director, alternating studio material like Pete’s Dragon, The Old Man & the Gun and Peter Pan & Wendy with pleasingly idiosyncratic projects like the poetic mood piece about time and loss, A Ghost Story, or the imaginative chivalric fantasy, The Green Knight. His new film belongs decidedly in the latter grouping, but it’s all style, no substance, despite lots of heat from Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel in what’s essentially a two-hander.

As a global pop sensation whose stage costuming includes ornate halos that make her look like sexy religious iconography and clearly contribute to the cult-like devotion of her fans, Hathaway is a commanding avatar for music superstars from Taylor Swift and Beyoncé to Lady Gaga and Madonna. (Lowery has acknowledged the film of Swift’s Reputation stadium tour as a key inspiration for the concert scenes.) But it’s Coel, as Sam Anselm, a maverick British designer with the arch intensity of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, who dominates the film, for better or worse. 

The heady visuals at times recall the films of Tarsem Singh, which means the strengths of Mother Mary are mostly aesthetic, from the elaborately staged performance interludes to ghostly, quasi-horror developments as the central pas de deux yields more secrets. 

Despite reams of dialogue that tends to be enigmatic if not downright opaque, the gothic melodrama is stretched too thin to have much grip. In its bias of effect over emotional complexity, the storytelling leans more toward music-video atmospherics than robust narrative. To that end, suitably trance-like original EDM songs by Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX and FKA twigs, alongside Daniel Hart’s score, are a vital component. But none of that does much to camouflage a core drama that’s pretentious and dull.

In ominous voiceover, Sam feels her bile rising as Hathaway’s Mary approaches after a decade-long estrangement. Sure enough, Mary shows up unannounced, bedraggled and strung-out — unlike the leggy goddess we see on stage — at the English countryside estate that serves as the designer’s atelier and home. The pop star needs a dress for a comeback show the following weekend, just days away, which Sam and her aloof assistant Hilda (Hunter Schafer, wasted) say can’t be done. 

But we all know how that goes. Sam tosses around lofty claims about her creative process — she describes her work as “the transubstantiation of feeling” — but soon she’s draping bits of fabric on Mary like a Project Runway contestant confounded by the challenge. 

It emerges that although visionary image-maker Sam built the look that made Mother Mary an object of worship to millions of fans, the singer unceremoniously dropped her 10 years ago with no explanation. Sam has not listened to her music since; she found that hating Mary was the only way to soothe her abandonment.

Coel bites into the acerbic bitterness of that history in their early exchanges, with a vein of malice in questions supposedly intended to reveal who Mary has become and hence what kind of dress will feel true to her. Sam refuses to hear the new song Mary plans to debut, but she does consent to watch the dance — without music — that the performer has worked out to accompany it. Hathaway hurls herself into that punishing sequence with violent physical force and emotional rawness.

Then come the ghosts. Without giving too much away, the long night they spend together takes on a hallucinatory quality as first Sam reveals a vision that appeared to her, beckoning her to follow, and then Mary confesses that the same vision entered her body and can only be released via a flesh-wound portal. Or something.

Lowery manifests that vision as a swirling tangle of red fabric that acquires an almost corporeal form, a mesmerizing jolt of color in the sumptuous darkness of DP Andrew Droz Palermo’s visuals (Rina Yang shot the concert scenes). But what it means beyond the obvious connotations of a tortured connection in the blood — encompassing creative collaboration as well as a personal, possibly even romantic, bond — is anyone’s guess. It’s no clearer even after some occult business in a chalk circle transports them back to a night in which Mary and a group of young women participated as Imogen (FKA twigs) physically summoned the spirit in a seance.

Given that Hathaway plays Mary not as an entitled diva but a tremulous mess, at risk of being consumed by her public image, the drama invests heavily in the possession and exorcism aspects. It must be said that Hathaway looks sensational in Bina Daigeler’s stage costumes, and while her vocals are electronically enhanced to death, the songs are convincing and catchy enough for her to pass for a legit music phenomenon.

Lowery is digging into the mystique of pop superstardom and the creative alchemy that makes it happen, the intimacy of inspiration and the enormity of communion with a massive audience. Some might be willing to find depth in his stylish, stylized but gossamer-thin depiction of a woman at the height of her performative powers struggling to bear the weight of her stage persona. I found it a bore — self-consciously cool but distancing and empty.

At least the dress (by Iris van Herpen, no less) is a knockout. No prizes for guessing the color.