There’s something about ‘Mother Mary’
David Lowery’s latest film is a ghost story, a concert movie, a witchy parable floating on incantations, and a post-mortem of a friendship.
It’s part horror movie, part comedy, part music video, and part gothic mystery, which might be about the creative process, maybe about depression, or perhaps a metaphor for religion. It doesn’t matter which, because the fact is, Mother Mary is one of the strangest movies of the year, and the one I just can’t get out of my head, so let’s start with the basics. The film stars Anne Hathaway as theatrical pop star Mother Mary, whose music walks an uncomfortable line between Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift, thanks to the involvement of Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff, about to make a comeback, and in order to feel like herself again, she seeks the help of her ex-best friend and fashion designer, Sam Anselm, played by Michaela Coel.
Unlike most fashion designers, Sam lives in a gothic mansion, works in a barn that very obviously does not have enough light for anyone to see fabrics, let alone sew them, and hates Mother Mary to her very core. The rest of the film involves the two women circling each other in that unlit barn and arguing in husky voices about opening and closing metaphorical doors. They swap stories of self-mutilation, a ghost that looks like a scarf, and a séance led by FKA Twigs. Woven through this uneasy reverie are concert set-pieces in which Mother Mary performs in front of packed stadiums dressed in her trademark halo and dancing like Beyoncé on her Reformation tour. Finally, the women stage an exorcism.
All of this sounds messy and unhinged, and I assure you that it is; there was a part of me that wondered why they didn’t just cut 30 minutes out of the film by having the actors talk at a normal human speed, and several of the songs were distractingly vanilla, but there is something about this movie that refuses to be dismissed. Even when the music flattens into forgettable background pop that contradicts all we are told about Mother Mary and her iconoclastic fame, it sinks its claws into you and achieves some level of cinematic transcendence.
It’s bold, for one thing. At a time when most movies that go into wide release are either direct sequels or so devoid of originality that they may as well be, Mother Mary is bursting with ambition. It meanders through lengthy conversations and then stabs you with the occult, or a hanging, or a voiceover that sounds like a spell. Ideas flow from it like a chemical spill, and it is twisted and cryptic, the way many of us were hoping Emerald Fennell’s Wuthering Heights would be.
In fact, if I have one quibble with Mother Mary, it’s that Charli XCX’s contributions should have been swapped, where her raw, eerie soundtrack to Wuthering Heights is much more suited to the enigmatic Mother Mary, and her Antonoff collaboration is much more suited to Fennell’s pseudo-trangression. It wasn’t until the credits rolled that I realised that there is not a single man in the cast of this movie. It has the audacity to be completely female, and the unexpected subtlety to pull it off without a hint of gimmickry.
This is a portrait of two women who have given their lives, and maybe more, to their artistry. Mother Mary claims to have written the greatest song of her life, and for her comeback, Sam will create the most staggering dress ever designed. They speak in absolute terms, in a way that no piece of art can ever be objectively described. For them, the art is everything, and they will give themselves over, again and again, to be reborn and obliterated by it.
From its marketing, you might think that Mother Mary shares some DNA with Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, which explores the occasionally erotic relationship between two ballerinas whose rivalry takes them beyond the edge of sanity, but it is much more in keeping with the macabre surrealism and messiness of Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak, which was poorly received upon its release. That film stumbled when it tried to explain itself, but Mother Mary avoids explanation almost entirely. We don’t know why Mother Mary is so haunted or how the women share a literal ghost, and neither do we know where that being came from, what it represents, or how it’s banished, or whether it is magic, metaphor, or none of the above.
There is more than a hint of absurdity within all the grandiose musical interludes, blood-letting, and ouija-boarding, but by the time the credits rolled, I was crying, because in all its messiness, Mother Mary is overflowing with care. Creativity flickers from every frame, and even when it doesn’t make sense, it has something to express, standing as bewitching and moving in equal measure.
