David Lowery’s “Mother Mary” is his most romantic film, which says a lot because the guy is a hopeless, devastatingly earnest romantic. It’s less that Lowery, the filmmaker behind “A Ghost Story” and “The Green Knight,” always front-loads a love story, and more that his view of the world, the cast of his lens on reality, is inherently reverential and glowing in a wholly unique manner. The first film I ever saw of his was actually a short film called “Pioneer”, where a father (William Oldham) tells his son a bedtime story about his life that is fantastical and impossible, but seemingly true. It’s haunting and lovely, which could describe almost all of his films. Lowery has the ability to cast his line deep into the cosmic soup and conjure images that are as terrifying as they are sublime; an expedition into the existential with earnest love as one’s only compass point. In “A Ghost Story”, Lowery paints the afterlife as the slow crumbling of memory as a white-sheeted spirit wanders through time wholly alone and mute, watching with eyes that cannot blink and a consciousness that cannot die as everything it knew is destroyed, reconfigured by tragedy, and reborn into something alien but new from the accumulated star stuff, that which we always have been and will be. If there is another running theme of Lowery’s work, it is certainly a belief in the things unseen, a symbiosis between disparate realms of consciousness that makes the metaphorical literal and the unimaginable tangible. With “Mother Mary”, the Writer/Director returns to the land of specters and spooks in a haunted house tale where the past is the afterlife, the future is Hell, and the only people in the whole world who fully live in the purgatorial middle ground are two former lovers whose star stuff cannot help but collide one last time.
The titular Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) is a pop superstar, a cross between Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, and Beyonce, whose onstage persona tends toward lavish gowns, religious iconography, and ornate halos. As the film opens, we watch her perform for an adoring crowd, yet catch glimpses of something terrible that happened at a particular concert; a suicide attempt, an accident, who can say? As she is being fit for her next performance, one of the most important of her career, where she plans to unveil a new song entitled “Spooky Action”, Mary senses something supernatural that makes her panic and flee. Something is wrong, or is everything wrong? In a fit, she charts a private flight to a secluded dress shop in England where her former lover/dress maker Sam (Michaela Coel) has crafted a quiet, if lonely, life of artistic obsession and creation. Mary busts down her door, face leaking from tears, rain, and shame, and asks Sam to make her a dress; the greatest dress she’s ever worn, something with an ethereal translucence able to extricate the demons clinging to her tastefully tattooed skin. Her only requirement is that it cannot be red. Sam wants nothing to do with Mary; she shut her out long ago for a reason, though the challenge of creating a dress in so short a time is intriguing. It’s actually the real-time power imbalance that Sam is most interested in exploring. Mary needs her, is literally racing in from the rain and begging her for something; a salvation deeper than fabric, a spiritual resurrection. Sam can’t resist. And so, bound together in a crumbling farmhouse, Sam and Mary get to work, peeling back the sticky dermal layers of their relationship to find that perhaps just below flesh level, their blood still spills as one.
Lowery is at his most pared-back since “A Ghost Story” here, keeping his camera and our attentions secured fully on the sparring former lovers for nearly the entire runtime as they try to collaborate on something otherworldly. While Hathaway gets quite a few chances to perform as “Mother Mary”, with several catchy pop songs provided by Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs, this is no concert film. This is a chamber piece where the chasm between two people is as infinite as it is intimate, with a relationship palpably felt in the simple looks and unfinished sentences of two people who know each other better than they might prefer. Behind her perpetual smile that she wears as if chainmail on the battlefield, Coel’s Sam is guarded and probing, eager to stick a sewing pin into the soft flesh of Mary and twist it to find some buried truth to fuel her inspiration and morbid curiosity. It is Coel who is our guiding light through the story in a sparkling and damning portrayal of a woman who just can’t help but pick at scabs long healed. As someone who missed her work on “I May Destroy You”, I was transfixed by her. Hathaway, a movie star in mid-resurgence, deftly plays both sides of the Mother Mary coin, with the spotlight-facing goddess on one side and a trapped rabbit on the other. Something is stalking her consciousness, something goading her toward an understanding beyond herself. It’s no mistake that her next song is called “Spooky Action”, a phrase coined by Einstein to explain the quantum entanglement of paired particles so inexorably connected that measuring one instantly determines the state of the other, regardless of distance, both literal or emotional. She is surely connected with something she cannot explain, something that follows and covets and will not give her peace. The bond that secures Mary to Sam has reached its breaking point, a rubber band pulled taut and soon to snap back. Rest assured, for all the petty baggage of lovers extricated, there are indeed spirits tormenting them both, though not the kind we are used to. “Mother Mary” is many things, but at its heart, it is another Lowery ghost story where the love between two people is the dead thing calling out from the backrooms of existence, yearning to be resurrected into the light of the living.
“Mother Mary” presents art as exorcism, no matter the medium. Mary’s music and Sam’s dresses; each twisting and recombining together, awoke something that has incepted itself into their blood, into their bones. It’s a shared curse, the burden of connection, that even when smothered in the womb, cannot fully die. There is a humility, wreathed in desperation, that brings Mary to Sam’s door; an understanding that she needs help to excise whatever simmers behind the mask of her pop star smile. For Hathaway, this performance is an unmooring of self-image, where the curiosity in her eyes leads us to fear what she sees but also be fascinated by it; to be drawn down the path without caring for what we might find. As much as “Mother Mary” is about two people finding they are laced together by forces far beyond their comprehension, it is more about what passion can be wrought from a stonewalled heart; not a malevolence but something bold, loud, angry, and undeniable. Something red. Lowery, whose name will ever be associated with the classic sheet ghost, knows that what we wear is less a definition of us than a reflection, a dilution of light and color meant to bring forth something otherwise hidden. To be seen as we would prefer. To do that, Mary must eviscerate herself on the altar of her own magnificence, offering Sam, lover, confidant, and exorcist, the injurious scalpel. It’s those we love against our better judgment that somehow grasp how to cut the deepest and with the most precision, as if they know which bits of flesh we treasure most and can do without. Because they see us not for how we hope to be perceived but for how we really are, warts and scars and all. Who even needs ghosts? That’s the scariest prospect of all.
“Mother Mary” is an undressing, a de-glvoing, and an impassioned excavation of immense feeling left abandoned to die. What could have been a simple lost love becomes something more universal, penetrating, and beautiful. A new Lowery film is always an event, and “Mother Mary” is no exception.
Bow.
You’ll be glad you did.
“Mother Mary” is playing at Prytania Theatres at Canal Place.
