David Lowery describes his magnificently strange “Mother Mary” as a film about “how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful,” and he would know. The writer-director may have made a name for himself with scrappy indies (“Ain’t them Bodies Saints”) and esoteric genre experiments (“A Ghost Story”), but he built a career for himself with the likes of “Pete’s Dragon” and “Peter Pan & Wendy” — with movies that rescued something poignant and real from the creative abyss that is Disney’s live-action remake culture, a magic trick so ineffable that it amounts to a corporate act of transubstantiation.
Like WB-era Christopher Nolan (albeit on a smaller scale), Lowery did such a delicate job of hopscotching between “one for them” and “one for me” that it was almost difficult to tell them apart at times. Someone in Lowery’s position might insist that they were all for him, but after bearing witness to “Mother Mary,” I’m more inclined to believe that his unusually heartfelt studio work stems from a profound resignation to the fact that some of them weren’t. While several of Lowery’s non-Disney features and shorts have been about storytelling’s unique ability to divine personal meaning from a cruel and indifferent universe, his “paycheck” gigs have allowed him to explore that fascination from the inside out — to sublimate himself into the alchemic process by which even the most obvious of products can become holy vessels of communion for their audience.
At once both Lowery’s sparkliest and most inscrutable film “Mother Mary” doesn’t just represent his overt attempt to reconcile and confuse those two modes, it also offers a thrilling opportunity to plunge us into the liminal space that separates them from each other. To crystallize the volatile — even violent — energy that binds artistic connections across space and time. A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Anne Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Michaela Coel), this talky chamberpiece of a film is almost entirely confined to an unheated barn somewhere outside of London, and yet it grows to feel as vast as the synaptic gap that stretches between literalness and metaphor. A wound and its memory. A pop song and the person who wrote it.
On its most basic level, this is a story about a very famous singer who needs her former best friend and collaborator — now a renowned fashion designer with her own atelier — to drop everything and make a dress for her big comeback performance the next day. The two women haven’t spoken in 10 years when Mother Mary shows up on Sam Anselm’s doorstep with sad eyes and stringy hair, like a lost dog who got caught in the rain, and her spurned BFF leaps at the chance to make the most of her leverage.
Indeed, the first half of the film assumes the fetishistic edge of a humiliation ritual. Mother Mary shivers in the middle of the barn with her head slung low while Sam upbraids the pop star for leaving her behind for other, whiter designers when her career went supernova. A rope-a-dope prelude to one of the most commanding performances she’s ever given, Hathaway whimpers like a punished child as Coel takes an inquisitor’s pleasure in the torture, her eyes burning with the same rage that has kindled her own career ever since Mother Mary set fire to their friendship. Sam dreamed of being the person who armored Joan of Arc, not the person who put a torch to her pyre; she aspires to make her clients stronger, and so nothing could be more offensive to her than the sight of Mother Mary, perhaps the most powerful woman she’s ever dressed, pathetically begging the designer for her life.
The specifics of Mother Mary’s crisis are fittingly ill-defined for a movie whose characters are bound together by quantum entanglement (the pop star’s comeback single borrows its title from the concept of “spooky action at a distance”), but it’s clear that she lost sight of who she is at some point, a disorientation that may have led to other disasters. Mother Mary got blinded by the lights, and now she needs help from the only friend who ever saw her clearly if she hopes to rise from the ashes like a phoenix — if she hopes to retrieve something personal from the act of performing a song that will be digested by millions of fans.
Maybe, by airing out her old resentments, Sam will be able to summon Mother Mary back to her artistic spirit. “This is not a ghost story,” the film’s poster cheekily insists, but it is a seance. While that much is clear long before Lowery busts out an actual Ouija board and begins to playfully blur the line between the real and the representational (a febrile mindfuck that allows the movie’s Bergman-esque first half to melt into its more Fosse-inspired final gasps), the first of the film’s show-stopping set pieces more closely resembles an exorcism, as Sam forces Mother Mary to perform the Dani Vitale-designed choreo for her new single without music. This is where Hathaway’s performance comes to life, her body possessed into a symphony of slamming bones and labored breathing that give physical dimension to the power of creative force.
“Where do ghosts go when you don’t need them anymore?,” someone asks, and it feels like Mother Mary’s have stayed trapped inside her and grown desperate for a way out. Like, say, an idiosyncratic auteur who’s bound to studio IP, the pop star is trying to push herself forward with one foot stuck in the past, and she comes to Sam desperate for a dress that might cut her open and provide a conduit for expiation. You get the sense that all of her songs — a bevy of genuine bops written by pop luminaries Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs (who plays a critical role on camera), all of which Hathaway credibly performs via intermittent tour flashbacks — are fundamentally about her friend break-up with Sam, even if they resonate with her fans on much different and more romantic terms. What’s the difference between a disposable pop song and a deeply personal confession? Whoever’s listening to it, I guess.
Mother Mary insists that she’s looking for “a point,” and it’s a wonder to watch Hathaway sharpen as the film goes on, the actress marshalling her own star power into an arena-worthy icon who’s been eaten alive by the energy she’s asked to conduct on stage every night (“You give people the thrill of giving a shit about you,” Sam tells Mother Mary). Her character grows stronger through her submission to Sam’s annihilating fury, and is equally believable as a wounded dove and a woman on top of the world. Coel’s role offers less room for movement, as it’s grounded in the inescapable gravity of Sam’s imperiousness, but “I May Destroy You” breakout allows that anger to melt into awe when it counts; by the end, the love and hate that she feels for Mother Mary are as tightly bound together as a verse and its chorus.
It’s all rather vague and uncertain, like the contours of a rotting old friendship; the movie’s surfaces are as simple as the lyrics of a pop song, and its depths as rich and boundless as the feelings that same pop song might summon. Lowery is drawn to that tension, if also comfortably uncertain with what he might find there (this feels like the most “one for me” movie he’s ever made, and yet I struggle to imagine how someone wouldn’t be able to see themselves in it, or at the very least be enamored by its design). Bina Daigeler’s vibrant, sometimes vaginal costumes, Andrew Droz Palermo’s evocative cinematography, and Daniel Wurtzel’s ethereal special effects combine with the songs and performances to create a clarity of vision that allows Lowery to get lost in the dark portal he creates for himself, less a hall of mirrors than a black hole.
The details of Mother Mary and Sam’s relationship are hard to hold onto, but the further Lowery pulls these two women apart — from each other, and themselves — the more palpably we feel the connection between them, and how they might have been able to so powerfully affect each other from across time and space over the last 10 years. What happens when two people, or even two sides of the same person, are bound together by a shared feeling of unshakeable absence? The same thing that happened in another of Lowery’s films: They haunt each other to the ends of the earth. Every song becomes a seance, every bump in the night turns into evidence of a specter. Quoth Virginia Woolf: “Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting.” This beguiling movie flings them back open just as fast, as it explores how art — and maybe art alone — has the power to heal the wounds that can make it hurt so much in the first place. It’s not a ghost story, it’s a resurrection.
Grade: A-
A24 will release “Mother Mary” in theaters on Friday, April 17.
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