There is a bracelet. Beaded, handmade, the kind teenage girls trade outside stadium gates. Anne Hathaway gave it to David Lowery when they wrapped Mother Mary, and written on it, in the way only one name could logically appear, was Anti-Hero. When filming ended, Lowery's star gifted him a Taylor Swift-style beaded bracelet with "Anti-Hero" on it. That object, small and a little goofy, tells you more about what this film is and where it came from than any synopsis could. Mother Mary is not a Taylor Swift biopic, not a Beyoncé portrait, not a Lady Gaga origin story. It is something stranger and more ambitious than any of those things. It is what happens when a filmmaker and his collaborators spend years inside the emotional architecture of contemporary pop stardom and then try to build their own cathedral from the rubble.

The Blueprint Was Always Taylor Swift

Lowery said he "definitely brought a lot of Taylor Swift to the table in terms of who Mother Mary was," adding that he would often think, "Imagine Taylor Swift in 10 or 15 years — that's sort of who this character could be." That framing matters. It is not Swift as she is now. It is Swift projected forward into a life of accumulated weight, of the particular loneliness that only arrives after you have spent a decade being worshipped by millions. Mother Mary is the shadow at the end of that trajectory.

The Reputation Stadium Tour was not casual viewing on this production. The team took three songs from Reputation and broke them down "shot by shot," asking what each shot would cost to replicate, using the concert film as a literal budgeting tool because they needed to figure out how to pull off a stadium show on a minimal budget. "We were literally using Reputation as a guide," Lowery said. That granular, practical devotion to a single source text shaped the visual language of every concert sequence in the film.

Both Lowery and Hathaway attended Swift's Eras Tour in Europe during production. The film was shooting concert sequences in Bonn, Germany, and Swift's European leg was close enough to feel like a parallel universe running alongside their own. If ever a Taylor Swift tour was made for a psychological horror film, it was Reputation: darker than her other tours, built around snake imagery, black bodysuits, and pyrotechnics. That aesthetic register, the gothic theatricality of a performer staging her own mythology, sits deep in the bones of Mother Mary's visual world.

But the Swift connection runs deeper than spectacle. Hathaway's character was also inspired by Swift's 2020 Miss Americana documentary, and how vulnerable Swift let herself be in it: what happens to a pop star who we're used to seeing in their power and polish "when they're in-between moments and they're having a moment of metamorphosis, which can be so painful." The character of Mother Mary lives in that in-between. She is not at the top. She is not yet fallen. She is in the brutal middle passage of a comeback, and that uncertainty is where Swift's documentary gave Hathaway her emotional footing.

Beyoncé and the Sound of Stillness

At a press conference in April 2026, Hathaway revealed that she drew specific inspiration from Beyoncé's track "American Requiem" from Cowboy Carter as the key to understanding how to perform her character, saying that Beyoncé's "technique in that song is so mesmerizing and astonishing," and that "listening to her phraseology, her musicianship, understanding the history of her voice that had led her to be able to make that sound that is so still, so present" was essential.

Still and present. Those two words describe what Hathaway needed to locate inside a character who is, on the surface, all performance and spectacle. Hathaway also drew inspiration from Beyoncé's concert film and live album Homecoming. Her approach was not to imitate these artists but to "study them in order to know the space they occupied so completely" that she could find "where there was negative space still to be claimed" — the choices that other people hadn't made that felt authentic to this specific film. That is a sophisticated creative act. Not theft, not homage. Cartography. Finding the unmapped territory between cultural monuments and building something new there.

A Composite Pop Deity, Not a Portrait

In preparation for the shoot, Lowery and Hathaway also watched Madonna's Truth or Dare, Gaga: Five Foot Two, and Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé, and discussed Britney Spears circa 1999 versus today, especially the turmoil revealed in her 2023 memoir. The cumulative effect of all that research is a character who holds multiple cultural inheritances at once. Critics have described Mother Mary as part Beyoncé, part Taylor Swift, part Lady Gaga, but mostly an ode to Madonna: a musical icon on the verge of cracking, searching for spiritual answers and repair of a relationship destroyed when fame got in the way.

What makes the character function is precisely that she cannot be pinned to any single real woman. The moment you see Swift in her, the Gaga disappears. The moment you register the Madonna-style Catholic mysticism, the Beyoncé stillness recedes. She is not a reference. She is an amalgamation that produces something the source material never could, a fictional pop deity built from the composite emotional DNA of women who each, in their own era, became something close to a religion for their audiences.

Lowery drew inspiration from the almost religious followings that sprout up around artists like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, and Madonna. These people became more than singers or dancers. They became Mother. The title is not metaphorical. It is the argument.

The Music Carries the Claim

None of this creative archaeology works if the music feels fake. Original songs were provided by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX, with FKA Twigs also contributing an original song, and all seven original songs on the soundtrack are performed by Hathaway herself. Hathaway underwent extensive vocal training for the role and performs her own songs, including "Burial," which opens the film.

The choice of songwriters is not incidental. Antonoff and Charli XCX are among the most culturally fluent producers working in pop right now, and their involvement gives Mother Mary's fictional discography the specific credibility that a commissioned film score could never achieve. According to Lowery, Mother Mary's greatest hits span 2003 to 2017, and because pop trends are so "liquidy," he wanted to keep that timeline a bit fuzzy, so her sound needed not to hew to one precise era or micro-genre. That fuzziness is the point. A character too precisely dated would collapse into pastiche. Mother Mary needs to feel like she could have been everywhere and always.

The soundtrack album, Mother Mary: Greatest Hits, was announced in March 2026 and released on April 17 via A24 Music, the same day as the film's limited theatrical opening, meaning the music arrived as its own entry point. You could fall into Mother Mary through the songs before you ever entered the barn.

What the Film Does With All of This

The research and the references would mean nothing if the drama at the center did not hold. And it does hold, even when the film strains against itself. A billowing bolt of crimson fabric haunts both the film's main characters, appearing at crucial junctures in their lives, serving as a warning, a temptation, and a reminder of the literal and figurative threads that bind them. Lowery made A Ghost Story with a sheet and a room. Here, he makes a ghost story with a dress and a wound that is ten years old and never properly sutured.

In dreamlike flashbacks to Mother Mary's superstar days, her concerts seem to take place in darkened cathedrals rather than stadiums, with the audience rendered as an abstract field of glowing lights — a technique that lets Lowery evoke stadium-sized performances on a modest budget, but also communicates the intense loneliness of a life lived at that scale of fame. That loneliness is where the Taylor Swift research, the Beyoncé research, the Madonna fascination all converge. Not as aesthetic borrowing but as emotional truth. These artists know something about performing inside a loneliness so large it looks like triumph from the outside. That is what Mother Mary is about. That is the ghost the red fabric represents.

The film pivots into something truly supernatural in a way that doesn't always work. Sam and Mary share what could be called a ghost story, represented by a flowing red piece of fabric, and Lowery's film really goes off the deep end in storytelling terms, sometimes losing its way as it crashes through its ideas. The critics who love it and the critics who resist it are often describing the same scenes, just weighting them differently. On Rotten Tomatoes, 68% of 122 critics' reviews are positive, with the consensus reading: "Anne Hathaway acquits herself well as a believable pop star in Mother Mary, a modish psychodrama that can be frustratingly obtuse but has style to spare."

What the numbers cannot capture is the specific quality of ambition on screen here. This is a film made by people who spent years inside the music and the iconography and the psychology of pop stardom, who attended actual stadium concerts during production, who broke down concert films shot by shot and built fictional discographies with the best pop producers working. Lowery describes Mother Mary as a film about "how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful," and he would know.

The bracelet Hathaway made for Lowery after they wrapped was not a souvenir. It was a record of what this film cost to make, emotionally speaking. They went deep into the mythology of Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Madonna, Gaga, Britney, and came out the other side with something that belongs to none of them. That is the thing worth seeing.

Mother Mary is in US theaters now, in limited release from April 17 and nationwide from April 24, 2026. The soundtrack album Mother Mary: Greatest Hits is available via A24 Music.

Watch this when you have just left a concert still vibrating, or when you need to be reminded that the person on stage is also, somewhere, terrified.