2026 is a good year to be an Anne Hathaway fan—perhaps the best thus far. Various media outlets have noted that the Academy Award-winning actress has six feature films in which she is either starring or part of a larger ensemble slated for theatrical release this year. It’s somewhat disheartening, then, that the first of these releases, the glitzy, star-studded The Devil Wears Prada 2, seemed destined from the outset to eclipse the more mild release of David Lowery’s Gothic pop psychodrama Mother Mary, starring Hathaway and Michaela Coel. Indeed, to say that the rollout of the A24-produced picture could’ve been handled more effectively is an understatement. Not even the trailer—which flaunts the contributions of FKA Twigs (who also appears in the film), Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX to the soundtrack—nor the stellar all-female supporting cast, were capable of drumming up any anticipation for the film’s release.

This is disappointing but not surprising, because Mother Mary doesn’t seem to be designed to—nor does it seem particularly intent upon—appealing to the masses. Like many of Lowery’s previous films, it is oblique in its rendering of its characters and narrative, impressionistic in its visuals to the point that casual moviegoers are bound to find it pretentious or inscrutable. In the film, Hathaway plays the eponymous Mother Mary, a pop star who has stepped out of the limelight in the wake of a personal and professional tribulation. Ahead of her return to the stage, she appears on the doorstep of Sam Anslem (Michaela Coel), a fashion designer with whom Mother Mary had previously collaborated with prior to a falling out. While the terms of their separation are not disclosed at the outset, we are given the impression that what drove them away from each other was as monumental as the force that pulls them back together. It sets the stage for a taut dialogic chamber piece as their reckonings with their shared history.

David Lowery is a fascinating director, in that he is both intriguing and at times confounding. He’s moved deftly between deeply affecting, artistically charged indie projects (Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, A Ghost Story) to more commercially appealing adaptations and remakes (Pete’s Dragon, Peter Pan & Wendy, The Old Man and the Gun). It’s difficult not to wonder whether Lowery’s film—which he also was the sole writer on—might’ve been born out of a reckoning with his own artistic spirit, one that is capable of creation and destruction in equal measure. At the heart of both Mother Mary and Sam’s creative guises is the transubstantiation of trauma into a transcendent artistic experience—music and performance as exorcism; a garment that does more to reveal its designer than it does to clothe the wearer.

The problem with Mother Mary is not in its ideas, but in the execution of them. At the crux of the narrative is the fraught bond between Mother Mary and Sam, but this relationship lacks the substantive quality that would justify its being the film’s central conflict. When Sam pointedly asks Mother Mary why she no longer wanted Sam to dress her, Mother Mary offhandedly states that she wanted a change. It's one of the many foregone opportunities to give the audience proper context to what could’ve driven them apart, or for what made their bond so strong in the first place.

The same issue is reflected in the crafting of Mother Mary as a pop star. There’s no doubt that Anne Hathaway is completely believable when evoking the gravitas and star power of a female pop star in the live performance scenes that are interposed throughout the film, but when the glamorous artifice of these performances is stripped away, it’s difficult to connect with Hathaway’s fictional pop star on any meaningful level. Again, the audience is told that she is a world-renowned artist, but the claustrophobic English barn in which the majority of the film takes place functions as a hindrance to its narrative force rather than an enhancement to it. 

The same problem comes into play as the narrative introduces a ghost that takes the form of a length of fabric, which both women are visited by on the same night. The length of fabric ostensibly functions as an allegory for the tether between the two of them, and plays a pivotal role in the incident that causes Mother Mary to retreat from the limelight. Lowery is no stranger to hauntings—both literal and figurative—in his films (see A Ghost Story), but once again the psychological weight the film attempts to lend this narrative arc is mitigated by the fact that its foundation has not been properly established. It’s one of many qualms that critics have had with Lowery’s previous work, that while he’s adept at crafting a spectral, affecting image, it fails to register on any more substantive level when it is more closely examined.

Mother Mary is one of Lowery’s more inscrutable works, so much so that it’s difficult to distinguish between a deliberate alienating spectacle and narrative deficit. While it may indeed be Lowery’s attempt to examine the destructive power of creative practice, it feels too underdeveloped and convoluted to have anything conclusive to say on it. For those willing to fall under the spell Mother Mary intends to cast, there’s plenty of sumptuous visual and dialogic intrigue to indulge in. For those who find that the spell is more easily broken, they might empathise with Mother Mary’s admission to Sam that “these metaphors are exhausting".