It’s said that holding onto resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. As the new psychological drama Mother Mary opens, it’s clear that fashion designer Sam Anselm (played by Michaela Coel) has more than her fair share. After years of crafting bespoke costumes for pop singer Mother Mary (played by Anne Hathaway), their creative collaboration is cut short, leaving Sam shamed and stunned. She retreats to the English countryside and picks up the pieces, continuing to consult for clients who don’t perform for thousands of screaming fans but provide steady business nonetheless. Sam and her team are surprised to see Mary turn up at Sam’s home, rain-soaked and white as a ghost, years after their partnership ended. Desperate for Sam’s help, she says she needs a show-stopping dress for her comeback tour that kicks off in three days; it’d be a difficult request under normal circumstances but given the context, it’s more in the area of “unthinkable”.
Though she’s shaken, Mary attempts to ingratiate herself with Sam by saying she hasn’t changed since they last saw each other; Sam insists that she has, shooting back, “You’ll see what the years have made of me.” She hasn’t listened to Mother Mary’s music since their relationship dissolved and she doesn’t plan on breaking the streak, making Mary perform the taxing choreography for her new song “Spooky Action” without backing music. Her jagged movements read as those of a woman possessed and as the two women move forward with their improbable joint effort, they confide in one another that they’ve each been haunted by a spectral figure adorned in elegant cloth. Their only chance of cleansing themselves from the lingering spirits is to navigate their turbulent shared past and find a way forward together.
Mother Mary is another moody, metaphor-laden affair from writer-director David Lowery, operating here in a similar vein of his other A24-distributed existential dramas A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Quality-wise, his latest effort falls somewhere in between those two, occasionally labored in its personification of the central analogy but frequently stunning in its craft and execution. The movie has two very different locations that function as a pair of “home bases” for most of the runtime: the blindingly-lit packed arenas in which Mother Mary performs and Sam’s spare barn-turned-workshop. As the two women rehash their past, the set design brilliantly merges these vastly different locales seamlessly and in stunning fashion.
If Mother Mary isn’t quite a horror film and not exactly a music movie either, it’s best categorized as a tense two-hander between a pair of actresses operating at a mutually high level. Anne Hathaway does a great job belting out the film’s original tunes — penned by Charli XCX and Taylor Swift collaborator Jack Antonoff — but even aside from the music, this stands as one of her finest performances to date. It helps that she has the marvelously magnetic Michaela Coel, who flawlessly conveys Sam’s bitterness without making her seem cruel or petty, as a scene partner. Their work together is marked by restraint, a fierce determination by both characters to redirect their emotions and to delay words unsaid just a little bit longer. As good as the play-like production design is, Hathaway and Coel are the reason to see this movie.
The tête-à-tête angle of the film ultimately coheres better and is more psychologically compelling than the supernatural elements, which take hold around the halfway point during a séance sequence. David Lowery’s imagery, involving the ghost in fabric that haunts both Mary and Sam, can get redundant and heavy-handed down the stretch. The music score by frequent Lowery cohort Daniel Hart sets the quieter scenes well but there’s one particular montage where the composition was so bombastic that I actually had to stifle a chuckle. Seven features in, Lowery has proven himself to be a filmmaker who takes chances with his storytelling, in haunted tales like this and in his takes on fantasy adventures like Pete’s Dragon and Peter Pan & Wendy. Like Mother Mary wears a halo on her head for her sold-out performances, Lowery wears his heart on his sleeve when committing his vision to the screen.
Score – 3.5/5
New movies coming to theaters this weekend:
The Devil Wears Prada 2, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, reunites a legendary fashion magazine editor-in-chief with a pair of her former assistants, who have since risen the ranks within the industry.
Animal Farm, starring Seth Rogen and Gaten Matarazzo, adapts George Orwell’s satirical fable of anthropomorphic farm animals as they rebel against their human master and hope to create a society where all animals can be equal, free, and happy.
Deep Water, starring Aaron Eckhart and Ben Kingsley, follows a group of international passengers en route from Los Angeles to Shanghai as they’re forced to make an emergency landing in shark-infested waters.
Reprinted by permission of Whatzup
