by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $17.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Alba Baptista, Isaura Barbé-Brown, Sian Clifford, FKA Twigs
Intro:
… a psycho-pop thriller that weaves esoteric magic with a sharp, blood-stained needle.
Mother Mary is a film about a pop star, but not necessarily about pop music. While the soundtrack from Daniel Hart (with assists from Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and supporting star FKA Twigs) provides suitable stadium fillers, and Anne Hathaway’s performance sells her convincingly as a post-Lorde pop idol, the sounds are ultimately the smallest piece of the puzzle.
As Hathaway’s titular singer reconnects with fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), the resulting discussions about crafting the look of an icon go much deeper than just matching the right look with the right tunes and the right moves. For these two, making such a persona is a work of alchemy. Of witchcraft. Of exorcism.
Writer/director David Lowery essentially treats popular music much like he did Arthurian knights in The Green Knight, examining the divine power that is accessed by becoming a figure of myth, and the mortal flesh that must be excised and pried open to craft such an image. Indeed, most of the film’s visual power comes from its use of symbols. Colours that reach deep within the subconscious of both the characters and the audience. The set design that transforms a repurposed barn/art studio into an opulent parlour, a stadium stage, and a theatre of the mind. The costuming that takes ordinary fabric and turns it into damnation and salvation.
To an extent, Lowery is quite open-ended about the exact square being circled by all these sigils, to the point where even Mary and Sam get lost in the sheer abstraction at times. But he also allows an ease in the audience becoming just as lost in the ideas presented. As Mary herself demonstrates throughout, there are certain sensations and understandings that are beyond mere words, and even at its most obtuse, there’s a captivating, seductive lure to the film’s psychological etchings.
Of course, it helps that the characters at its centre are worth gravitating towards. Mary as the extremely Taylor Swift-coded pop star, right down to the Eras-esque framing of both her career and her image (even Sam’s suggestion of a dress made up of all her previous dresses sounds like an idea T-Swizzle herself would’ve rejected for being too daring), besieged by fears of becoming a dead star. And in Sam, the film hints towards how normalised the exploitation and appropriation of Black culture is within the pop music sphere (and not just in the West; the K-Pop scene is rife with such things), but also a shared dismay at how easily one’s creative work can be twisted; how an artifice meant to bolster a genuine personality can itself become the personality.
Between them, there’s a crackling atmosphere that incorporates as much pop iconography as chaos magic, fashioning Mother Mary into a living, breathing hypersigil whose notes can bring awe not just to legions of tear-stained fans, but to the artists themselves. It’s a very ‘Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria’ way of looking at the trappings of pop fame (or, to put it more bluntly, a very A24 perspective on something like The Eras Tour), and one just as invested in the notion that magic exists just as readily in sound, movement, and captured image, as it does in the rituals of old. But then, what is filmmaking if not the compiling of audiovisual runes?
Mother Mary finds David Lowery still exuding fascination for the ways of myth and legend, but with a darker, angrier edge compared to his cottagecore approach to Disney remakes (Peter Pan and Wendy, Pete’s Dragon), or the depressive coma of A Ghost Story. Essentially a two-hander between Anne Hathaway and Michaela Cole (with FKA Twigs bringing one of the more captivating séance sequences in recent years), it’s a psycho-pop thriller that weaves esoteric magic with a sharp, blood-stained needle. Like any great pop song, it has an immediate, emotion-stirring impact, but delving deeper reveals the kind of minute details that can form intense connections with those who hum on the same scale.
