When post-production finally wrapped on David Lowery’s long-gestating “Mother Mary,” the Wisconsin filmmaker didn’t mince words about the process of assembling this particular feature: “It wound up being the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” It’s difficult, at first glance, to take such a statement at face value for what is essentially an intimate chamber piece anchored by just two performers—especially within a filmography that has brought Arthurian myth to life, explored the vastness of human experience through a figure wandering beneath a bedsheet, and found warmth and poignancy in a live-action remake of “Pete’s Dragon.” But within five minutes of “Mother Mary,” it becomes unmistakably clear that David Lowery’s self-described “gentle experience” could only locate that gentility in the dark embrace of something exhausting and indescribable, pulling at you until you begin to unravel at the seams. Contradictory as this may sound, “Mother Mary” still glides along with that same tangible warmth that permeates through all of Lowery’s work.
But this time, that warm glow is only felt as a counterweight to the persistent chill that looms when the spectres of your past manifest into something that terrifies you with both its foreignness and its familiarity. When that indefinable spectre brings with it the gut-feeling that some part of you, no matter how small, recognizes exactly what it is and why it’s come to welcome you into the dark abyss it calls home. Or maybe that spectre wants the very opposite—to reach out and be pulled away from that emptiness within.
All of this and none of this is apparent when the titular Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) pulls in unexpectedly on the doorstep of Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Mother Mary (only ever labelled by her stage name) is a seismically world-famous pop star whose image brings with it a sprawling fervour that matches—or even exceeds—the music itself. And all of that is (was) thanks to Sam as her primary designer… for a while.
After coming up in the industry together, something—namely, Mary’s need for a change in image and her careless handling of the transition—has driven them apart, and has left neither of them the same since. Both women have clearly been left shaken in the aftermath of their separation, and both express their disequilibrium in completely opposing manner. Mother Mary, the regal, commanding stage presence, is reduced to a sickly, trepid mess whenever the stage lights go out and the spotlight shifts to whatever lies beneath the pageantry.
Sam, meanwhile, has become a hardened (and successful) solo designer who can’t help but relish in the perseverance she has found despite her former boss’s cold dismissal, and return that scornful air in kind when the pop queen comes sobbing along, desperate for her one-time designer to create a defining dress for her next performance. Nevertheless, Sam agrees to take on the task, and the fact that neither of these women knows precisely what they want out of this experience is exactly what makes “Mother Mary” such a mercurial exercise in real-time oral therapy. If Lowery has made no secret of his desire and intent to find in this experience something of a spiritual reset, somehow lacking in his phantom masterpiece from nearly a decade ago (“This Is Not A Ghost Story,” indeed), then his resultant process highlights exactly what can come from therapy without professional guidance.
It’s messy, unwieldy, and sometimes dangerous, but in Lowery’s hands, it channels something visceral that only he could summon, if even by complete accident. Also Read: The 50 Best A24 Movies The inherent roughness of that session is evident in the pained performances that flow through this rickety barn like a shocked nervous system. Hathaway, mousy and uncertain (her hair always wet and stringy from either the rain or a shower) bleeds all over the floor, while an especially raspy and piercing Coel hardens and clots, withholding until just the right moment to unleash another bitter reminder of the shifted power dynamic that has found its way to the one-time employer-employee (and maybe, probably, something more?) relationship.
If that shocked nervous system then becomes exhausting in its initial push and pull of discussing what they know they don’t know. Lowery makes it all worthwhile when the baggage that haunts these ladies takes on a more literal manifestation, and the shapelessness of a loose piece of fabric unleashes its formidable beauty as it wisps through the blackened corridors. What exactly transpired between Mother Mary and Sam beyond the obvious dismissal is left vague, because for Lowery—and for his two vessels—it doesn’t matter what happened so much as the impression it left, lingering on like, as Sam puts it in her opening lines, a carcinogen.
What “Mother Mary” is about, then, isn’t quite as opaque as the means through which Lowery opts to explore it and, more pertinently, how openly he embraces the inability to articulate it. For a f