Mother Mary (2026) Review: A Visually Controlled but Emotionally Distant Pop Star Drama
David Lowery directing feels like he’s trying to gently convince you that confusion is a form of enlightenment in Mother Mary.
I don’t consider myself stupid (much), but with Mother Mary, I did sit there for a good while trying to figure out what I was actually watching, and I don’t mean that in a clever way either.
Plot
Long-buried wounds rise to the surface when iconic pop star Mother Mary reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer on the eve of her comeback performance.
Good Points
Strong central performances
Visually controlled
Striking use of music and performance
Interesting thematic ambition around fame and identity (Mostly)
Bad Points
Emotion is often buried under heavy symbolism
Uneven tone that never fully settles
A distance between audience and characters
Music occasionally carries more weight than the script
Not always satisfying as a cohesive narrative
My Thoughts on Mother Mary
It feels like it’s asking you to decode it instead of feel it
Mother Mary loves to lean into abstraction, where everything feels layered, symbolic, and slightly withheld.
It’s not trying to tell you a story in a straightforward way, more so it’s trying to build an experience out of ideas, fragments, and emotional echoes, but the problem is, that approach creates distance, where I felt like I was trying to interpret what I was watching before I could actually connect with it.
Thankfully Anne Hathaway is pretty good here, with an intensity to her performance that borders on overwhelming, but it suits the world she’s in, and she plays it like someone that is fully aware of the emotional stakes she holds, even when the script is circling instead of landing.
At times too, she also feels almost self-aware, like she knows how strange everything around her is and decides the only logical response is to push further into it,, and while it doesn’t always balance cleanly, it’s never half-hearted.
Michaela Coel is the counterweight, and without her the film would drift completely even more, as she’s often the only presence that cuts through the abstraction, and whenever the film starts spinning into metaphor or detachment, she pulls it back into something slightly recognisable.
But with the supporting cast, it feels like they’re orbiting a different version of the film - Hunter Schafer appears in moments that feel interesting but underused, FKA twigs shows up with a kind of performance-art energy that doesn’t fully integrate into the narrative, while others drift in and out without ever quite locking into the same emotional register, so it just adds to that feeling that the film is actually just a collection of overlapping ideas.
The emotional connection never fully locks in
The film features a big gap between intention and impact, as while the film is clearly interested in betrayal, fame, artistic identity, and the emotional residue of past relationships, but it rarely lands, as it’s filtered through symbolism and staging that sometimes helps and sometimes blocks access to the emotion underneath.
But this is where the music comes in, as it’s the music that is doing a lot of the emotional work, especially in building the world of the pop star and giving shape to moments that the dialogue doesn’t really support, and at times, it feels like the clearest emotional language the film actually has going for it, which in one way is good, but in another, it clearly creates an imbalance.
It’s beautifully controlled, but also distant
David Lowery’s direction is precise, I will certainly say that much, as every frame feels considered, and every moment held just a little longer than expected, with some shots that genuinely stand out, but that restraint also sometimes tips into distance.
It starts to feel like the film is observing its own emotions rather than actually inhabiting them, which fits the tone, but it also makes it harder to stay emotionally engaged as the viewer.
Tonally, it also sits in a middle space - too abstract to at times, too restrained, and too distant - it keeps shifting between modes without fully settling into any of them, so that inconsistency makes it hard for the film to find any rhythm.
But I have to say, for all the effort put into this film, the strongest moments are surprisingly simple - whenever Hathaway and Coel drop the layers and just exist in the emotional reality of a scene, the film clicks into something much more effective, but they just don’t happen consistently enough to define the film.
Final Verdict
Mother Mary is certainly fairly ambitious and carefully made, but its also emotionally uneven, and while it reaches for something interesting, it doesn’t really connect.
But hey, maybe I am just a bit stupid!
Trailer
Directed and written by - David Lowery
Cast - Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, FKA Twigs, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Isaura Barbé-Brown, Sian Clifford, and Alba Baptista
Cinematography- Andrew Droz Palermo and Rina Yang
Running time - 112 minutes
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I think you're right on the money. I did a pretty full breakdown of the symbolism and structure of the film, but I came to the same conclusions. I broke down the more impenetrable parts and underneath I realized the film is just about pop star economics (who cares) and 2 lesbians reconciling in a barn. I still really enjoyed the movie, because style is substance in cinema, and Lowery sure has a very interesting style.
VERY pretty and kind of entrancing, I just wish it wasn't so smug and bougie and self-important and interested in sniffing farts. The previous sentence refers to the film, and also Anne Hathaway.