Mother Mary stars Anne Hathaway as a larger-than-life musician (think Lady Gaga) whose carefully constructed persona begins to unravel when she reconnects with her former friend, a fashion designer played by Michaela Coel. Directed by David Lowery, the A24 film blends stylized storytelling with a soundtrack that features songs by Jack Antonoff, Charli xcx, and FKA Twigs, with Hathaway performing the music herself.
While some critics have praised its bold artistic vision and Hathaway and Coel’s committed performances, others find it emotionally distant and uneven, resulting in a very mixed critical response. The film has a 77% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 61 on Metacritic.
THE GOOD
Brian Tallerico at RogerEbert.com gives the drama 3 out of 4 stars and praises Coel’s performance as Sam Anselm, a fashion designer and Mother Mary’s best friend who was left behind after Mary found success. He also commends Lowery and A24 for taking “big swings.” “It is another story about the intersection of fame and art, but it’s not like one you’ve seen before, a two-hander that owes as much to The Exorcist as it does to Lady Gaga.” However, he notes that the film “pivots into something truly supernatural in a way that doesn’t always work.” He adds that Lowery’s film “really goes off the deep end in storytelling terms, sometimes losing its way as it crashes through its ideas.”
David Ehrlich at IndieWire gives the film an A-minus, calling Mother Mary “a singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama that’s staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva (Hathaway) and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons (Coel),” adding, “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.”
THE MIXED
Jake Coyle of the Associated Press gives the film two and a half stars out of four, describing it as a “spellbinding chamber drama that grows more operatic with every stitch.” Writing about the story of a mega pop star, he adds that “it is, at the least, the first movie that could be called an earnest attempt to meld Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour with A Christmas Carol.” He also notes that Hathaway “makes not just a believable pop star but an indelible portrait of an artist’s ego in extremes.” But at the same time, he observes that “The characters even walk through their past in Dickens-styled flashbacks. Mother Mary gets more visually captivating but more tiresome.”
Owen Gleiberman at Variety praises the dynamic back-and-forth between Hathaway and Coel: “The talk stretches on for a while, and since the two actors are vivid and on point, we’re fine with settling into one of those movies that’s essentially a two-hander.” However, he says he wishes the film had “sustained two-hander” energy, but instead, “Mother Mary turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux. It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.”
THE MEH
Nick Schager at The Daily Beast says Hathaway fails hard in what he describes as “an ungodly mess.” He takes issue with the film’s “morass of Important Themes, excessive emoting, and florid direction,” all of which, he argues, make it “downright insufferable.” He doesn’t stop there, writing, “Save for those brief moments when Mary commands a crowd, there isn’t a second when it resounds as believable or engaging, the result being a film that’s only success is in eliciting a headache-inducing number of eye rolls.”
David Rooney of The Hollywood Reporter offers a critical take on Mother Mary, writing that “the gothic melodrama is stretched too thin to have much grip” and suggesting that Lowery’s latest film falls short. While some viewers might be willing to find depth in his “stylish, stylized but gossamer-thin depiction of a woman at the height of her performative powers struggling to bear the weight of her stage persona,” Rooney remains unconvinced, concluding that he “found it a bore — self-consciously cool but distancing and empty.”
