Modern pop star meets gothic melodrama in David Lowery’s phantasmagoric Mother Mary, a tale of two women bound across time and space by their personal and artistic histories.
Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) is a global pop icon who has crafted a larger-than-life persona across a decades-long and successful career. Finding herself in crisis, desperate to shed the smothering weight of all she’s become, the superstar turns to the only person she trusts — fashion designer Sam Anselm
(Michaela Coel), the visionary friend she abandoned years ago. When Mother Mary resurfaces out of the blue at Sam’s country estate, requesting one final dress for the performance of a lifetime, so begins a hallucinatory night of confrontation, collaboration, memory, and reinvention…
Shimmering with music, fashion, and surreal horror, Mother Mary is a beguiling and dreamlike spectacle
It ebbs and flows with sensation as Mother Mary’s quest for the perfect dress spirals into a spellbinding dance between two luminaries retracing the contours of their relationship.
A delirious ode to writer-director Lowery’s own pop fandom, Mother Mary takes a deep dive into the live-wire exchange of energy between creative forces
Featuring songs written by Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff, and co-star FKA twigs, Lowery’s latest feature explores two artists’ pursuit of creative salvation during their darkest hours. “Pop songs have the power to unite millions with shared emotion — they can make you feel seen and heard, even heal a broken heart,” says Lowery, whose previous works include The Green Knight and A Ghost Story. “Mother Mary is about how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful.”
Hathaway underwent a bold transformation for the role, including voice and dance training, mastering the highs and lows of a pop queen with an ornate swagger who is also cracking at the seams. “Mother Mary explores creativity, forgiveness, loss, regret — and what it means to have unfinished business with someone you love,” says Hathaway. “David brings every aspect of this to life in gorgeous and moving ways you haven’t seen on screen before.”
For Coel, whose Sam Anselm is Mother Mary’s greatest regret, as well as her sole remaining lifeline, the symbiotic allure between the two estranged women proved enthralling. “I was drawn to exploring two people whose bond is so strong that words and science can’t explain it,” says Coel. “Their creative connection becomes a spiritual one. David’s writing and direction was like a magnet for me.”
An icon is born
Mother Mary has forged an alter-ego millions identify with, even worship, but the star begins to wonder if her authenticity is made of artifice. Looking for answers, she arrives on the doorstep of her estranged friend and former creative partner Sam Anselm — whose star diminished as Mother Mary’s rose —
searching for a concert dress to solidify her fame.
Sam has only one day to create the dress, but that epic 24 hours unleashes a flood of memories and a spiritual rekindling that offers a new future for the estranged friends. This central premise grew into one of Lowery’s most imaginative stories yet, with forays into haute couture, intricate choreography, stage
design, and the creation of a pop idol’s discography out of thin air.
Lowery began writing the project as an escape
“It started out as a two-hander in a single location,” says the writer-director. “I wanted to make a movie that was nothing but dialogue, that would be two great actors and a great script and nothing else. I honestly thought it would be fast and simple.”
Nearing the end of The Green Knight and on the cusp of making Peter Pan & Wendy for a major studio, feeling torn about who he was as a storyteller, Lowery began writing a conversation between dueling versions of himself. Eventually, those avatars took on distinct form: Mother Mary and Sam Anselm, who came to life full of brilliance and festering tensions. These were anything but simple characters, united by their fiery creativity and outsized ambitions, while torn by a stinging betrayal.
“They were no longer two opposing sides of me,” says Lowery. “Their lives gained an immensity all their own.”
The women’s ten-year estrangement became the story’s guiding force. “I’m interested in the energy between people when you collaborate creatively. It can be energising and healing – but it also can turn sour,” says Lowery. “In this case, where one person is the public-facing expression of this creation, while the other remains invisible, an imbalance develops, and it begins to fester.”
As the movie opens, the intensity of the collaborators’ feelings remains undiminished by time or distance. Though Mother Mary and Sam haven’t spoken in years, their link is by no means severed, which haunts the film from its core. Mother Mary reveals she has been working on a new song entitled “Spooky Action,”
a nod to Einstein’s “spooky action at a distance,” or quantum entanglement, the phenomenon in physics where particles, no matter how far apart, continue to affect one another.
With its dark twists on feminine divinity and ecstasy that reach back through centuries into Catholic mysticism, the roots of Mother Mary’s iconography were at once personal and woven from actual pop history. Spanning the influence of Madonna on Lowery’s youth to the present-day spectacle of Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, Mother Mary is an amalgam of trail blazing, button-pushing pop heroines.
“I was raised Catholic, so my parents were very anti-Madonna — to them, she was transgressing upon all that was sacred,” says Lowery. “As a 10-year-old, that made me want to listen to her more. As I grew older, I found something just as sacred and ecstatic in pop music as my parents found in church. It goes
beyond simply merging the sacred and the profane; religious icons and pop icons go hand in hand in what they provide to their respective audiences.”
Accompanying Lowery as he wrote the screenplay was a playlist he would later share with cast and crew, including such diverse artists as Lorde, St. Vincent, Robyn, Taylor Swift, Halsey, James Blake, Aldous Harding, PJ Harvey – as well as Charli xcx and FKA twigs, not knowing the latter two would go on to become creative collaborators with Lowery once cameras rolled.
As the film moved into prep, with a script that only contained rough descriptions of songs that would later be brought to musical life on screen, Lowery began to suspect that Mother Mary would become his most complex movie project to date.
His stellar cast crystalized its power. “Once I started talking to Anne and Michaela, I realized I had barely scratched the surface of these two women and their connection,” Lowery admits. “They brought so much to the table that I had never considered; I learned so much about these characters from them.”
David Lowery is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and editor known for his lyrical visual style and his fascination with myth, memory, and the emotional undercurrents that shape human experience. Born in Milwaukee and raised in Texas, Lowery first gained attention on the independent film circuit with Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), a poetic outlaw romance that showcased his gift for blending intimate storytelling with sweeping cinematic imagery. He went on to direct Pete’s Dragon (2016), a critically acclaimed reimagining of the Disney classic, and A Ghost Story (2017), a haunting meditation on time, grief, and the traces we leave behind. Lowery’s boldest artistic leap came with The Green Knight (2021), a visionary adaptation of Arthurian legend that cemented his reputation as one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary cinema. Known for his atmospheric world‑building, emotional precision, and willingness to take creative risks, Lowery continues to craft films that feel both timeless and deeply personal, exploring the spaces where myth and modernity collide.
