Mother Mary, the latest from David Lowery, is a hard beast to define. It’s a psychosexual thriller, a gothic romance, a costume drama, a pop musical, and, despite the tagline, a ghost story. It’s a bundle of different moods each more dramatic than the last and its one off the oddest “big” releases of 2026.
Anne Hathaway stars as Mother Mary a global pop sensation who arrives one stormy night at the bustling country manor of her estranged bestie and dress designer Sam, played by Michaela Coel. Mother Mary has been off the radar for a few years, after an undisclosed incident, and is about to return to the spotlight but none of her outfits inspire. So the two old friends, powerhouses in their chosen professions, hunker down for a night of nostalgia, catharsis, and brutal honesty which will push them to the edge of reason. Especially once they admit to both seeing a strange apparition which questions their sanity and their bond.
In Lowery’s filmography, Mother Mary fits in with A Ghost Story and The Green Knight as a visually ambitious picture playing with big metaphors and lashings of drama. Coel and Hathaway are catnip for each other onscreen. The Shakespearean hatred, and affection, between the two is perhaps too obtusely articulated in Coel’s flowery monologues, and yes Hathaway’s pathetic simping seems a tad overbaked but, as the film goes on, the black rose of their relationship unfurls. Do we get deeper truth? Understanding of who these people are to each other? No not really, the film stops short of explicitly outing the pair, instead it lets the intensity of emotion render the question defunct.
It’s not a love story and, again as the tagline professes, it isn’t a ghost story either. So what is it? Well, it’s a mixture of the two. If ghosts are memories then Mother Mary becomes a nostalgia story. Two people so desperately impacted by each other that they can’t move on, as Sam professes at one point; she’s in her “Havisham period”. Mother Mary is just stepping back into the spotlight, this time round, she wants to shirk the Joan of Ark halos that became her trademark, a ham-fisted glimpse into the way Sam perceives her and puts her on a pedestal. That pedestal proves Mary’s downfall at one point. It’s blatant, on-the-nose, symbolism but that’s the vibe to be honest. Lowery doesn’t do subtle.
Mother Mary is Grim Camp; dark, charged, and Gothic but it’s also slick and silly, poetic and preposterous, melodramatic and moody. It’s sometimes sickeningly self-important, but it still makes time to pull off huge, exuberant pop showcases which Hathaway (singing herself of course) brings to life with verve.
The bops in question were put together by Charlie XCX and Jack Antonoff (writer/producer for Lana Del Rey, Taylor Swift, Sabrina Carpenter, and Lorde) while production design falls to The Great’s Francesca Di Mottola. Hence why the costume drama, musical numbers (it’s not a musical per say but it’s pretty close), and Hathaway’s pop persona feel legit enough to buy into. Like Smile 2, a lot of the film’s entertainment comes from actually executing catchy pop and not a dogshit rip off. So between the possessions, sapphic sexual tension, bitter battle of the wills, traumatic flashbacks, there’s respite in some big campy stadium pop.
Like most of Lowery’s films, there’s the threat of style over substance. He has a tendency towards the ethereal, the beautiful, the visually entrancing, and the not-quite-finished. His films are gorgeous, painted in wide strokes of sheer vibrance, but as with The Green Knight there’s something missing, like the last ingredient never quite turns up, or the last mouthful is snatched away before we ever get to taste it. It leaves a kind of hollow ring with the closing credits that can’t be totally sated by visuals alone, but he damn well nearly pulls it off.
Mother Mary is so perfectly performed, so bitterly melodramatic, so easy on the eye, its hard not to fall under its glam pop gothic spell. It’s a cocktail of ideas and emotions that land so consistently, and are projected by its performers so brilliantly, that Lowery’s latest is one of the most interesting films, at least visually, of 2026.
4/5
Scott Clark
Dir. David Lowery
Stars. Anne Hathaway, Michael Coel, Hunter Schaffer, Sian Clifford, FKA Twigs,
