MOTHER MARY Review

There is a particular kind of friendship that does not end so much as calcify, turning slowly into something hard and permanent inside you, a stone where warmth used to be. We have all had one. A person who knew us before we knew ourselves, who watched us become something we are not sure we are proud of, and who we left behind without meaning to, leaving us unable to forget. It is also about pop music, ghosts, the price of fame, what art costs the people who make it and the people who love them. It holds all of these things at once without dropping a single one.

We went in expecting something beautiful. David Lowery has never made an ugly film. What we did not expect was to feel so personally found out by a movie that is set almost entirely in an unheated barn outside of London.

Every song, Lowery seems to suggest, is a confession addressed to one specific person. The millions who buy it are just overhearing something private.

Anne Hathaway plays Mother Mary, a pop star of planetary magnitude who arrives on the doorstep of her former best friend, Sam (Michaela Coel), with sad eyes and stringy hair, along with the desperate yet humbled energy of someone who has run out of other options.

Sam is now a celebrated fashion designer. The two women have not spoken in ten years. Mother Mary needs a dress for her comeback performance the following night, and she needs it from Sam. That need costs her something to admit and Sam knows it.

The film's first half is a slow, precise, almost unbearable humiliation with Sam circling her old friend like a prosecutor who has waited a decade for this deposition.

It is not comfortable to watch. And it isn't meant to be. What Lowery understands, and what makes this film so much more than a two-handed power struggle, is that the cruelty here is inseparable from the love. Sam is not punishing Mother Mary because she hates her. She is punishing her because the loss of her, ten years ago, was its own kind of violence, and the body keeps score even when the mind has moved on.

Hathaway gives one of the performances of her career. There is a scene where Sam forces her to rehearse her choreography in the barn with no music, just the sound of her own body working through the movements in silence. Just bones, breath and effort. It is easily one of the most arresting things we have seen in a theater in years. The machinery of stardom stripped of all its glamour until what remains is just a woman trying to find something real inside of a performance she has given a thousand times. Our entire theater sat captivated in silence.

Coel matches Hathaway with a performance rooted in a different register entirely: still, burning, gravitational. Where Hathaway expands to fill the barn, Coel contracts, her fury compressed into something dense and radiant. By the film's final act, when the fury begins to soften into something closer to grief and then to wonder, the shift is almost physically felt. These two performances are operating on a frequency that most films can never locate.

Lowery descibes Mother Mary as a film about how art turns something terrible into something beautiful. After seeing it, we believe him completely.

Mother Mary is strange in ways that reward surrender rather than analysis. A Ouija board appears. The line between the real and the representational begins to blur. The Bergman severity of the first half melts, into something more Fosse-inflected and kinetic, with the film's form shifting to match its characters' emotional thaw.

Andrew Droz Palermo's cinematography is ravishing throughout, and the songs, written by Charlie XCX, Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs, among others, are genuinely extraordinary. Hathaway performs them with the full commitment of someone who understands that pop music, at its best, is not decoration but confession.

We think about the friendships we have let calcify. We think about the people who knew us before we had anything to protect, who we left not of cruelty but out of the quiet cowardice of becoming. But it suggests, gently and then insistently, that art is one of the few places where the wound and its healing can exist in the same moment, where a pop song can be both a scar and a salve depending on who is listening and what they are carrying when they press play.

This is not a ghost story. It is a resurrection.

We left the theater a little shaken and very grateful. That is the highest compliment we know how to give.

🍿 SCORE = 91/100