Many Mothers

“Mother Mary,” the latest film from writer-director David Lowery, starts from a deceptively simple premise: A pop star visits her estranged former collaborator, a fashion designer, to commission a new dress for her upcoming tour. But Lowery, whose credits include “A Ghost Story” and “The Green Knight,” layers haunting imagery and dreamlike sequences onto this framework to create his most thematically ambitious effort yet. A two-hander brimming with psychodrama, “Mother Mary” is a meditation on the fraught process of creative collaboration in the shadows of commodification. 

Propelled by two exhilarating performances from Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, “Mother Mary” is a provocative chamber piece that muses on the nuances of creative partnership and how art is corrupted by capitalism. The story takes place almost entirely at the rural home of Sam Anselm (Coel), a highly sought-after fashion designer who is completing her latest collection. Burned by an earlier betrayal, Sam senses the arrival of her former friend, the pop music icon Mary (Hathaway), whom she describes in a damning voiceover as “a carcinogen.” Though the film never depicts their earlier relationship or its breakdown, it’s evident that Sam has evolved past any outrage, but she’s constructed a posture that is cool and detached, with a hard-earned air of superiority. 

When Mary arrives on Sam’s doorstep, soaked from the rain and desperate for a new dress for her upcoming performance, we get our first inklings of their codependent dynamic — Mary needs Sam to translate the ineffable into something tangible, an alchemical act of transmutation, not unlike ensorcelling armor with magic properties. Rattled by a disturbing event at a recent concert — glimpsed in a brief, haunting prologue — Mary is compelled toward a more authentic self-expression. 

What Sam demands, and Mary quietly concedes, is a more genuine partnership and an equitable distribution of control. Sam spent years laboring in the shadows to create Mary’s fashion aesthetic without attribution. Even worse, when given the opportunity to publicly acknowledge Sam’s work, Mary claimed the ideas as her own. The music industry notoriously has a long, shameful history of white people exploiting and stealing from Black artists. She might be well meaning, but Mary is no exception in this regard. The iconography — the heretical religious aesthetic and sleek couture — that has defined Mary’s artistic career was created by a Black woman who has never received the credit she’s due. 

Lowery doesn’t put too fine a point on this or any of the film’s other themes, an impressive feat considering how much “Mother Mary” relies on dialogue. His script never feels patronizing or self-satisfied in its gestures to the cultural history of exploiting Black artists like Sam, and Coel’s and Hathaway’s performances do much of the heavy lifting, provoking the viewer to contemplate these ideas as their characters do. “Mother Mary” is also a film about the profound relationship between two women, neither of whom is defined by heteronormative roles of wife or mother — a devastating rarity in 2026. Equally impressive is that the ensemble is wholly composed of women. There are a couple of background dancers and some men scattered among the crowd in concert scenes, but there are no male actors with speaking parts. It’s astonishing that a film that feels so distinctly feminine was written and directed by a man. 

Created by FKA Twigs (who also appears in a pivotal role), Charli xcx and Jack Antonoff, and sung by Hathaway, “Mother Mary’s” music is gothic art pop that evokes stained glass and abandoned cathedrals repurposed into dark dance clubs. It’s subversive and provocative for mainstream pop, and in the context of the film, it also feels like it’s edging toward something visceral that Mary is struggling to express. 

Sam isn’t interested in hearing Mary’s new song, “Spooky Action,” the title of which neatly alludes to quantum entanglement — the idea that once two particles become entangled, they remain connected, even when separated in time and space. Sam doesn’t need the mediator, so she asks Mary to perform the choreography (created by Dani Vitale) without the backing track. In what is perhaps the most breathtaking sequence in “Mother Mary,” Hathaway performs this physically grueling dance in total silence. When she seemingly stumbles over the choreography, Sam moves to stop her, only for a determined Mary to resume, as if it’s part of the act. It’s impossible to tell the difference. Mary’s physicality is astonishing, as underlined in the final moments, when she holds herself in a version of scorpion pose, her chest in the prone position, hovering over the floor, her legs extended in the air. 

During the discussion that follows, Mary suggestively places a hand on her stomach — she isn’t pregnant in the conventional sense, but talk of a late-night seance on a recent tour run threatens to tilt the proceedings to the supernatural, leaving us to wonder if Sam is dealing with more than just metaphorical demons. In designing Mary’s dress, Sam has her work cut out for her, because what’s required isn’t a syllogism, but something more akin to an exorcism. 

Lowery suggests that creativity is a burden, one that becomes exponentially heavier as an artist’s popularity grows. Collaboration is vital, not only to meet the production demand at scale, but to relieve the individual of that psychic weight. Egos, which threaten to upend the equilibrium, must be excised. Small moments — a humorous threat, a terrible scar — suggest Sam and Mary have attempted this collaborative process before, and failed. What ultimately emerges, this time, is a substantiation of creativity, an amorphous apparition rendered in red silk — a beautiful illustration of artistic collaboration that could, as is often the case in real life, also be perceived as a shared madness, or folie à deux. 

Despite its contemporary characters and setting, “Mother Mary” feels driven by the same elemental storytelling that informed “The Green Knight.” Set largely in the basement of Sam’s home in rural England, surrounded by walls made of stone, it has the quality of a medieval legend recontextualized for the modern era, in which two heroes trade ghost stories and excavate old wounds while forging armor for one last battle. Mary, the egotistical knight who returns from war, hollowed out and humbled by her follies; and Sam, the silver-tongued sorcerer who’s had years to practice her admonishing monologues in anticipation of this very moment. It is in some ways an inverse of “The Green Knight,” recasting Gawain as a narcissistic pop star who is belatedly reckoning with the consequences of abandoning her integrity and exploiting the generosity of others. Like Dev Patel’s protagonist, Hathaway’s Mary is realizing the agency she has over her own legacy. 

As a film, “Mother Mary” is a formidable work that will inevitably reward repeat viewings. As an expression, it’s equally compelling to consider in the context of Lowery’s career. His filmography is largely defined by intimate meditations on the divine power of storytelling and the meaning of myth-making (“The Green Knight,” “A Ghost Story”), interspersed with a pair of big-budget Disney films (“Pete’s Dragon,” “Peter Pan & Wendy”) in which similar themes are overshadowed by the inherent requirements of The Brand. Sam and Mary are representative of this apparent artistic dichotomy — two inextricable halves overcoming self-imposed exile in an alchemical reconciliation. The collaboration is intoxicating.