‘Mother Mary’ review: Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel impress in David Lowery’s finely-crafted psychodrama

Dir/scr: David Lowery. US/Germany. 2026. 112mins

Visually stunning and narratively opaque, David Lowery’s atmospheric Mother Mary is also never less than beguiling – even when it threatens to tie itself up in melodramatic knots. Starring Anne Hathaway as a troubled singing superstar and Michaela Coel as her estranged costume designer friend, it’s a bold, gothic, compelling study of the cult of fame, the creative impulse, the fragile threads that bind. Every aspect of the film is carefully crafted and calibrated in service of Lowery’s distinctive vision, and, while it may prove divisive, it casts a hallucinatory spell.

A fervent tapestry of blame and guilt, adoration and retribution

That is helped largely by the impressive central performances of Hathaway and Coel, whose presence should help generate interest when A24 opens the film in the US on April 17 and the UK-Ireland a week later. Critical and audience reaction is likely to be mixed, but Lowery’s fans will appreciate another singular addition to an eclectic canon, which includes the likes of Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), Pete’s Dragon (2016), A Ghost Story (2017) and The Old Man And The Gun (2018).

Pop star Mother Mary (Hathaway) is at the height of her fame after two decades in the business, and still packs out stadiums with legions of faceless fans who worship at the altar of her plaintive, provocative songs. The one person who seems utterly immune to Mother Mary’s charms is Sam Anselm (Coel), the star’s former costume designer who has since made a name for herself in the fashion world. The pair have been estranged for a decade; an opening voiceover from Sam goes so far as to describe Mother Mary as “a tumour”.

On the eve of an important show, Mother Mary finds herself struggling with a loss of confidence, something of an identity crisis. Unsure of where her fame ends and she begins, she appears at Sam’s home, desperate for her former friend to design her a dress that will bring her back to her true self. Over the course of a long dark night of the soul, during which the pair share memories – including visitations by a ghostly spirit made entirely of lustrous blood-red fabric – Lowery weaves the psychological, psychosexual and supernatural into a fervent tapestry of blame and guilt, adoration and retribution.

In his previous works, Lowery has proved attuned to nuances of emotion, confident in treading the fine lines between love and hate, life and death. As with A Ghost Story, Mother Mary deals in the existential themes of time, identity and connection – although this latest work is a far more verbose, pointed experience. The title speaks to the intertwining ideas of religious and pop-cultural iconography that permeate the narrative, and the songs (with names like ‘My Mouth Is Lonely For You’, ‘Holy Spirit’ and ‘Burial’) also tap that dual seam.

Those numbers, written by Jack Antonoff, Charlie xcx and FKA Twigs (who also co-stars here after appearing as Mary Magdalen in The Carpenter’s Son), are, surprisingly, the weakest tools in Lowery’s arsenal. Catchy but anodyne, they are perhaps deliberately representative of modern mass-market appeal, but pale alongside the hypnotic, pulsating score from regular Lowery collaborator Daniel Hart.

Cinematography from Andrew Droz Palermo is equally as well-pitched, evolving from static and reserved when Mother Mary first appears at Sam’s drafty, isolated home estate to fluid and intimate as the pair break down the barriers between them. The stadium sequences were shot by Rina Yang. Production and costume design is tactile and textured, the sensuous, balletic chiffon-spirit itself calling to mind several cultural touchstones from Peter Strickland’s In Fabric to Celine Sciamma’s Portrait of A Lady On Fire and even Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes.

Lowery was inspired to write this screenplay when he found himself working on The Green Knight and Peter Pan & Wendy simultaneously, the two very different projects forcing him to confront his own personal ideas surrounding art and the artist. Similarly, Hathaway’s performance astutely digs into the actress’s own global stardom; she pitches Mother Mary as an instantly recognisable and dynamic figure cut down to a shadow of her former self by the unending thirst for celebrity.

Yet, although Hathaway delivers some impressive performance sequences and a gruelling pivotal dance routine, it’s Coel who steals the show. Regal and assured, she is mesmerising as Sam, a woman shaped by betrayal but determined not only to stand her ground, but to push Mother Mary to the point of genuine self-reflection. Crucially, too, she delivers Lowery’s often-overwrought dialogue with an authenticity and power that grounds the drama, and allows its more salient points to rise above the tumult.