Earlier this year, hyperpop godhead and Letterboxd power user Charli XCX co-wrote and starred in The Moment, a recursive, mostly fictionalized mockumentary celebrating/eulogizing the singer’s “Brat summer” phenomenon. It’s amusing, if somewhat uneven, and very much a marker of its time. While watching it, however, I was reminded of a much older film: The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle, the infamous pseudo-doc made by manager/visionary/huckster Malcolm McLaren in the wake of the implosion of the Sex Pistols. Like The Moment, The Great Rock ‘n’ Roll Swindle serves at once as a work of self-deprecation and self-promotion, and as a tombstone for a singular album which was just about the only thing anyone in the music press wrote about for a good six months. While Brat and Never Mind the Bollocks don’t have much in common musically, the mythology is easily compatible. For all cultural intents and purposes, girlypop is the new rock ‘n’ roll.
Similarly, Mother Mary, the new film by David Lowery, applies an Eras Tour sheen to the gothic psychedelia of Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s rock star fable Performance. In both films, a haunted music legend (there, Mick Jagger as a not-at-all-veiled iteration of himself; here, Anne Hathaway as a fictional pop diva) retreats to a haunted mansion in the misty moors, where their battles with fame and their own, spectral pop stardom are externalized into literal phantasmagoria. Lowery’s film doesn’t quite hit the heights of Roeg’s (what music film could?), but it’s a deliriously spooky meditation on fame, fashion, and friendship, and a worthy entry in the cinematic pop-mythology canon.
Hathaway plays the titular pop star as a sort of Gaga figure who has retreated from the spotlight after some sort of onstage accident (we don’t learn the details until the final act, only that footage has long since gone viral). In our proper introduction, following the first of several show-stopping musical numbers, we meet Mary in street clothes, barging into the dilapidated manse of fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Mary, it seems, needs a dress for her big comeback show Monday (the one she’s slated to wear “doesn’t feel like me”), and insists that only Sam can create it for her. Sam has reservations; the two were close collaborators (and possibly more) early in Mary’s career, but split under not terribly amicable circumstances (Sam refers to Mary’s place in her memory as “a carcinogen”). Nevertheless, Sam agrees to help her former friend one more time, and the two descend into her cavernous estate to craft the garment and exorcise the ghosts of their past.
That’s not entirely figurative. As the two open up to each other, Sam reveals that, immediately after their falling-out, she witnessed a ghost of sorts, an apparition in the form of a flowing, amorphous, red garment crawling across her chamber floor (“This is going to sound like another metaphor,” she insists, “But I swear it’s not”). Mary reveals that she’s seen the same apparition twice, once possessing a friend at a party (FKA Twigs, who also co-wrote the film’s songs with Jack Antanoff and— who else?— Charli XCX) and once at an even more pivotal moment. The pair realize that, if peace is to be made between them, their demons must be exorcised, in every sense of the word.
Mother Mary is not based on a stage play, but it certainly could be adapted into one. The vast majority of the film consists of nothing but Hathaway and Coel verbally sparring. Mary is guarded but vulnerable, sticking her neck out to the one person she knows has no reason to forgive her. Sam, for her part, clearly relishes in twisting the screws— it’s clear she’s dreamed of this day for years— but there is clearly a level of tenderness on her part, too. Those averse to long, talky films (and this is one of the talkiest in ages) may want to sit this one out. “These metaphors are exhausting,” Mary sighs at one point following a particularly lengthy monologue, and I have to imagine a good portion of the audience may agree.
But the atmosphere of Mother Mary is so rich and foreboding that it’s damn near irresistible even before the overtly spooky stuff begins. Sam lives in the most dilapidated gothic manor this side of Crimson Peak (“I’m in my Miss Havisham period,” she quips), which she seemingly shares with only her ever-patient assistant (Hunter Schafer, as a sort of haute couture Igor). The ghostly scenes, meanwhile, are showstoppers, perfect little sketches of neo-Victorian eeriness. Lowery walks a fine line here, crafting perfectly functional horror movie beats without ever misleading us into thinking we’re watching a capital-H Horror Movie. “This is not a ghost story,” the first half of the film’s tagline reads, and it’s easy to understand what it means. Even if the ghost is not a metaphor, as Sam insists, it’s secondary to the phantom of its leads’ relationship.
The second half of the tagline is “This is not a love story.” By the numbers, I suppose that’s true as well. Lowery never quite comes out and confirms Mary and Sam as an ex-romantic item, though the way the two circle each other it’s difficult to come to any other conclusion. Even if one discounts a queer reading, though, this is still very much a film about love: the love between collaborators whose creative output is so intertwined that whether their bond is romantic or not is almost beside the point. Despite their considerable individual fame, it’s clear that each is only half their true self without the other. They might be working on a literal dress, but they’re also stitching up their combined self— or at least performing an autopsy.
One could almost imagine Mother Mary as a pure chamber piece, without its periodic flashes back to Mary’s glitzy musical numbers. But these scenes are essential, not only to add visual flair, but to add the cultural weight of the superstar. Had Mother Mary been made in the actual gothic era Mary might have been an opera singer, or perhaps a stage actress in the Sarah Bernhardt vein; centuries earlier and they probably would have had to make her a god. Pop music, and specifically the strain of optimized arena pop in which Mother Mary specializes, is one of the few remaining forces in contemporary culture to command such awe in the popular consciousness. Seeing an idol of this caliber in street clothes and emotional distress is like peeking behind the curtain of an all-powerful deity— and these days, pop stars are the only deities worth a damn.
Mother Mary
2026
dir. David Lowery
112 min.
Opens Friday, 4/24 @ Coolidge Corner Theatre, Kendall Square Cinema, Apple Cinemas Cambridge, Alamo Drafthouse Boston Seaport, and all local AMCs
