Mother Mary Is Arty, Self-Conscious, and a Total Slog

Everyone who loves movies loves being surprised by them: We love a good plot twist, a bit of evocative spookiness, an imaginative surrealistic fillip. (A cauliflower-cheeked lady singing in a radiator, anyone?) But the more movies you’ve seen, the less patience you might have with movies that try to impress you with how wiggy they are. That’s writer-director David Lowery’s Mother Mary in a velvet-lined nutshell.

Anne Hathaway plays Mary, a superstar singer with an adoring fan base, a la Lady Gaga or Taylor Swift, and a penchant for staging extravagant, melodramatic shows. Her costumes are mostly tiny dresses or bodysuits that show off her magnificent stems; her eyeshadow is as shiny as metallic car paint, and her hair, ironed as straight as Cher’s circa 1971, is always topped by some sort of spiked halo. She’s a mishmash of the sacred and the profane—the songs she performs in the movie’s brief concert segments were written by the likes of Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs, the latter of whom also has a role in the film as a sort of hippie-girl mystic. But as Mary rounds the bend toward the start of a new tour, perhaps her final one, something isn’t right. She’s cracking up, and it occurs to her that a new dress—one that captures her truest self—is the only solution.

But it has to be a dress made by one woman, someone with whom she’s intimately connected, though she tried to sever that bond long ago. That woman is Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), ostensibly an Alexander McQueen-level design genius. Mary, sporting her off-duty look of droopy, depressive sweater and lank hair, makes haste to Sam’s drafty gothic-rustic atelier, in the countryside of some unidentified European locale. In the doomy psychic voiceover that opens the film, Sam has already predicted Mary’s arrival, and she’s none too happy to see her show up. Their backstory unfolds in dots and dashes: Sam had been instrumental in shaping the Mother Mary persona at the beginning of Mary’s career, and it’s heavily implied there was a sexual bond between them, too. Then Mary severed ties with Sam, or tried to, though this whatever-it-is that connects them is still in play 10 years later. Their union is mystical, distinctly feminine, and unbreakable. There’s also a ghost involved, an unfurling manifestation of the connection between them, and she doesn’t seem to be in a particularly good mood.

All of that may make Mother Mary sound more intriguing than it is. Nearly all the action in the film, save for a few brief, cleverly staged concert sequences and a flashback or two, takes place in that cavernous atelier, as Mary and Sam spar and pick at one another. Sam, as Coel plays her, is cool and serene, but she’s angry, too, making no bones about it. Hathaway’s Mary is messy, fragile, aquiver with nerves, the exact opposite of Mother Mary’s stage persona. Still, she’s presumptuous—she’s shown up on a Thursday, and she needs her very special dress by Sunday. Sam is having none of it, at first, but somehow she’s seduced into complying. As she takes her old friend’s measurements, she makes note of a vertical scar stretching the length of Mary’s back (you can bet we’ll hear the story of that) and remarks on how much weight she’s lost. “You’ve gotten so tiny,” she purrs. “The tiniest intruder.” At this point, you might still be wondering about the psychosexual bond between these two: what exactly happened, and what yanked them apart? But before long, you may be too bored to care. There’s some occasional piercing of the skin with this or that sharp implement, to remind us that we’re watching a horror movie, but it’s never enough to jiggle the movie to life.

There’s lots of talking in Mother Mary. Sam hurls an accusation; Mary defends herself, feebly. Sam occasionally unfurls a length of fabric near Mary’s face—she is a designer, after all, even though this whole psychodrama is ostensibly about much more than a dress. The final creation, once you get to see it, was designed by experimental couturier Iris van Herpen, and it, at least, is a marvel of nautiluslike pleating. And the appearance of the ghost, as a ripple of color, is a minor jolt of intrigue. But even that ghost is too decorous, too fussed-over, to have much of an impact. Coel—recently seen as a sly art forger in Steven Soderbergh’s superb comedy-drama The Christophers—is a serene, magnetic presence, but her role here, as the angry, jilted maybe-lover, is thankless. Hathaway is best in the concert scenes—she’s aglow with fierce authority, and her legs don’t quit—but she’s a lot less fun in Mary’s off-duty mode; there are only so many ways you can make a puddle of insecurities interesting.

Lowery has made some very modest but effective movies (A Ghost Story, The Old Man and the Gun), and some heavily embroidered ones (like The Green Knight, a late-14th century fairytale extravaganza). But Mother Mary, arty and self-conscious, is just a slog. It works hard to impress us with its slinky weirdness, which isn’t the same as simply being weird. Sometimes a dress is just a dress, no matter how hard a filmmaker tries to write it into being.