When I walked into Mother Mary I didn’t really know what to expect, and honestly, I kind of love when that happens. Directed by David Lowery, this film looked mysterious and a little off-kilter in the trailers, and that vibe is exactly what the movie delivers.
What I got was something way more intimate and theatrical than I anticipated. This isn’t some big sweeping drama. It’s a locked-in, conversation-heavy character study that feels almost like watching a stage play unfold in real time.
At the center of it all is Anne Hathaway, playing a massive pop icon trying to claw her way back after a personal and professional collapse. She reconnects with her former friend and designer, played by Michaela Coel, and that reunion is basically the movie. T
he entire story lives and breathes in their interactions, their history, and the emotional wreckage they’ve both been carrying for years. It’s intense, uncomfortable at times, and completely dependent on these two performances.
To be fair, Hathaway and Coel absolutely crush it. They are magnetic together. Every glance, every line, every bit of tension feels loaded. Even when I wasn’t fully connecting with the story, I couldn’t look away from what they were bringing to their characters.
They bring a level of rawness that keeps the film alive, even when the narrative starts drifting into murky territory. Watching them work is honestly more compelling than some of the material they’re given to work with.
The film itself is extremely minimalistic, but also weirdly dense. It’s packed with metaphor, symbolism, and this slightly surreal energy that creeps in as things progress.
There’s even a faint supernatural thread running through it, but it’s handled in such an abstract way that you’re never quite sure how literal any of it is supposed to be. It’s like the movie wants you to feel something more than understand it, and that’s where things started to lose me.
I found myself constantly reaching for meaning, trying to piece together what Lowery was going for, and it just kept slipping through my fingers. The deeper it got, the more it started to feel like it was stacking ideas on top of each other without fully grounding any of them.
At a certain point, it became exhausting trying to keep up with what it all meant, and I started to feel a bit disconnected from the experience.
Visually though, I’ve got to give it credit. There’s a striking, almost gothic beauty to how everything is framed and presented. The way it captures the fractured relationship between these two women through its imagery is genuinely impressive. You can feel the history, the pain, and the weird gravitational pull they still have on each other. That part really works.
At a certain point, the film kind of deflates instead of building to something bigger. It doesn’t crash, it just sort of… fades out. There’s even a moment where Mother Mary admits, “These metaphors are exhausting,” and that’s how I was feeling about the film.
The movie piles on idea after idea, layering symbolism so thick that it starts to work against itself. It’s frustrating because the core of it is so strong. Hathaway and Coel are incredible to watch, and Lowery clearly has a vision he’s chasing, but the more it tries to say, the less it actually lands. Instead of those themes hitting harder, they get buried under the weight of everything stacked on top of them.
Then there’s the ending, which didn’t land for me. It just kind of fades out in a way that feels more frustrating than thought-provoking. I don’t mind ambiguous endings when they feel earned, but here it felt like the movie never fully clicked into place, so the payoff didn’t hit.
Maybe there’s a deeper interpretation that just didn’t connect with me, and I’m sure some people will get more out of it. I just wasn’t one of them.
At the end of the day, Mother Mary is a fascinating but uneven experience. I respect what Lowery was trying to do, and I admire the ambition behind it. It’s a film that swings big, even if it doesn’t fully stick the landing.
The performances alone make it worth checking out, but this is definitely one of those movies you need to be in the right headspace for. It’s not going to work for everyone, and honestly, I’m still figuring out how much it worked for me.
