Movie Review: MOTHER MARY

By ABBIE BERNSTEIN / Staff Writer

Posted: April 17th, 2026 / 01:04 AM

Rating: R
Stars: Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, Sian Clifford, FKA Twigs
Writer: David Lowery
Director: David Lowery
Distributor: A24
Release Date: April 17, 2026

Written and directed by David Lowery, MOTHER MARY won’t be for everyone. There are a few first-act moments that will either resonate strongly with a viewer and cause them to be immersed, or else what follows will be at best a well-performed curiosity and at worst too deliberately paced and symbolic.

MOTHER MARY begins by introducing us to our sometimes narrator Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), a fashion designer so successful that she’s got her own multi-structure atelier at a farm in outer London.

Even though she has thrived on her own, Sam remains bitterly hurt by her estrangement from former best friend and muse Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway). When they were young, Sam designed costumes for up-and-coming singer/songwriter Mary. But when Mary’s career took off and she became a Lady Gaga-like pop superstar, the relationship fell apart, both personally and professionally.

It’s been about ten years since the two women have spoken. But now Mary shows up on the doorstep of Sam’s (gigantic, two-story, full of assistants) workshop, saying that she needs a dress for her comeback performance, which is in a mere three days.

Once Sam gets over her initial reaction, she agrees, but she wants a sincere apology from Mary. What follows is mostly a two-hander that explores the nuances of female friendship, female power and perceived powerlessness, woven together (almost literally) with a supernatural element that is teased before it is fully revealed, and remains enigmatic throughout.

Although it is set mostly indoors, with all the contemporary trappings, there is something folkloric about MOTHER MARY. It also feels a bit like an Irish ghost story, a resemblance enhanced by a sequence with an Irish medium, well-played by singer/songwriter/actor FKA Twigs, who gets more than she bargained for.

When we see Mother Mary on stage in flashbacks, the songs (Hathaway and FKA Twigs collaborated with others on the writing of some of the numbers) sound and look credible as pop stadium acts. Filmmaker Lowery uses wide shots of the audience in the darkness, holding up little flickering lights, so that Mary appears to be expressing herself in space among the stars, radiant but isolated.

Intriguingly, when Mary and Sam are along together, it’s Sam who seems the more magical of the two. This is partly due to the character’s passion and creativity, and partly because Coel creates an aura of layers upon layers. For a long while, Sam doesn’t know what her innermost feelings are, so Coel gives us the woman trying on various emotions the way she might unspool a bolt of fabric to determine whether it’s right for her purposes.

For Mary’s part, she is largely spent. Hathaway gives us a character desperate for help, straining to break through her own inability to connect with anyone or anything. Hathaway’s performance has enough energy to hold our attention yet is convincingly shut down in the present. In Mother Mary’s onstage persona, Hathaway’s singing and dancing are good enough for her to be persuasive as a headliner.

In smaller roles, Hunter Schafer as Sam’s chief assistant and Sian Clifford as Mary’s main aide are both unassuming and efficient.

Lowery uses fabric and costume to make points, and MOTHER MARY’s costume designer Bina Daigeler’s contributions are impactful.

There are a few things that might have made MOTHER MARY feel more complete. As it does use flashbacks, not showing the original bond between Mary and Sam seems like a significant omission.

Otherwise, MOTHER MARY emerges as something like a dream that has portents and colors and shapes and human urgency that linger inside us after it ends.

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