Review by Eric Hillis
Directed by: David Lowery
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, FKA Twigs, Hunter Schafer, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber
Following Brady Corbet's Vox Lux and the recent horror sequel Smile 2, David Lowery's Mother Mary is another dark drama centred on a troubled female pop star. It also joins Peter Strickland's In Fabric and the "Weird Tailor" segment of Amicus anthology Asylum to form a sub-genre of horror movies featuring supernatural fabric.
The ageless Anne Hathaway plays Mother Mary, a pop diva whose career has been derailed by some ambiguous incident. Wishing to revitalise her image and get back to her roots, Mary arrives unannounced at the home of Sam (Michaela Coel), the costume designer responsible for fashioning her religious-inspired image back in the day, demanding that she make her a dress for her comeback concert, which is just a few days away.
There is clear animosity between Mary and Sam, and it's apparent early on that the latter hasn't forgiven the former for dumping her, both as a professional collaborator and a friend and maybe a little more. But while Mary's career is under threat, Sam has ascended in her field, and she takes great relish in seeing Mary reduced to begging for forgiveness. Despite her feelings, Sam agrees to make the dress.
For roughly its first hour, Mother Mary is a Pinteresque two-hander that plays like it has been transferred from a stage production with little fuss. Hathaway and Coel are excellent as two women pummelling one another with passive aggression. There is so much ambiguity in their animosity that at a certain point you begin to wonder if the movie is actually going to move on or continue repeating the same point. I began to wonder if I had misinterpreted the film's marketing, and that this wasn't actually a horror movie after all.
It's not really a horror movie, more a supernatural fantasy. There is a ghost here, but it isn't one from which we're supposed to cower in fear. The spectre takes the form of a long strip of red fabric, and has been seen at points by both Mary and Sam. What it represents is left to the viewer to decide.
There is a point where it seems Mother Mary is about to take a dark turn and become an allegorical exploration of the debt white pop stars owe black culture, but the casting of Coel and FKAtwigs (who contributes to the soundtrack, along with Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff) is very much of the colourblind variety, and the movie swerves any uncomfortable conversations in this regard.
Instead it becomes a hippy dippy tale of spiritual and spectral enlightenment of the type that suggests Lowery carries crystals in his pockets. Much of the second half is essentially a concert film for a fictional pop star, but despite the musical heavyweights involved and Hathaway's impressive voice, there is nothing visually or musically interesting about Mother Mary's stage performances.
There is one well rendered sequence that visualises the monotony of a pop star's life on the road by having Mary ascend and descend a series of backstage stairs, her fortysomething body visibly a little more drained each time she leaves another stage. But that set-piece only serves to highlight how dull and uninspired much of the rest of the film is, and the experience of watching Mother Mary is often akin to attending a concert by a performer you don't much care for.
Mother Mary is in UK/ROI cinemas from April 24th.
