There is a scene where Mother Mary, Anne Hathaway's pop superstar, is forbidden to sing her new single. So she dances it instead. No music. Just a body slamming against a barn floor, knees and elbows and breath doing the work a voice cannot. It's what Lowery frames as a kind of exorcism, and Hathaway's body becomes possessed into a symphony of slamming bones and labored breathing that give physical dimension to the force of creative need. That scene tells you everything you need to know about this film. Not what it is about. What it costs to watch it.

The question is whether that cost is one you want to pay.

What the Critical Split Actually Looks Like

While some critics have praised its bold artistic vision and Hathaway and Coel's committed performances, others find it emotionally distant and uneven. The film holds a 77% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 61 on Metacritic. Those two numbers, sitting next to each other, tell the story. The certified score says mostly fresh. The Metacritic score says the people who gave it thought, gave it mixed thought.

The gap between those figures maps almost perfectly onto a genuine disagreement about what cinema is for. IndieWire called it Lowery's sparkliest and most inscrutable film, one that offers a thrilling opportunity to plunge into the liminal space that separates two modes of filmmaking, crystallizing the volatile, even violent, energy that binds artistic connections across space and time. Variety called it thuddingly pretentious. Both of those sentences describe the same two hours of film. That is not a contradiction. That is the film.

Lowery is an adventurous director, alternating studio material like Pete's Dragon, The Old Man & the Gun and Peter Pan & Wendy with idiosyncratic projects like A Ghost Story and The Green Knight. Mother Mary belongs in the latter grouping. If you already have a relationship with that register of his work, you know your answer before you finish reading this. If you found A Ghost Story pretentious, this film will not convert you.

The Viewer Who Will Love This Film

Mother Mary is a 2026 psychological drama-thriller written and directed by David Lowery, starring Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, Atheena Frizzell, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Isaura Barbé-Brown, Alba Baptista, Sian Clifford, and FKA Twigs. That cast alone signals intent. This is not an ensemble designed for plot mechanics. It is assembled for atmosphere, for the kind of film that operates in sensation before it operates in sense.

A singular, hypnotic, and formally unbound psychodrama staged between a Lady Gaga-like diva and the only person who might be able to quiet her demons, the 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. That sentence is a test. Read it again. If your first instinct is pleasure, this film was made for you. If your first instinct is suspicion, keep reading.

Mother Mary marries the most elaborate of music videos and concerts with an intimate portrait of two human beings coming back together, however awkwardly, for the love of art after a near decade of estrangement. The musical architecture supporting that portrait is genuinely serious. Lowery blends stylized storytelling with a soundtrack that features songs by Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs, with Hathaway performing the music herself. Lowery drew partial inspiration from Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, and also from Taylor Swift's Reputation tour: "Her Reputation concert film is one of the best concert films ever," he said. "It's truly phenomenal." Hathaway's character is his vision of what a Taylor Swift-like figure would be in the future.

There is also a ghost story threaded through the film. A literal one. The film pivots into something truly supernatural. Sam and Mary share what could be called a ghost story, represented by a flowing red piece of fabric, and Lowery's film goes off the deep end in storytelling terms, becoming a swirling nightmare, as if one had pulled the curtain back on a Lady Gaga show to reveal actual monsters in the wings. If that image excites you, the film will reward you. The viewer built for Mother Mary is someone who understands that not every door a film opens needs to lead somewhere tidy. They find ambiguity generative. They are willing to feel lost in the service of feeling something.

Mother Mary asks something raw and relatable: as artists, or simply as people with aspirations, what does it mean to sell one's soul for a taste of success? That question lands harder the more you have personally wrestled with creative compromise or the cost of being known.

The Viewer Who May Struggle

Be honest with yourself here. Because Lowery is not going to be.

If you might be interested in the details of their breakup, keep wondering, as the script never wants to give that backstory much space. The film's emotional architecture leans on what it withholds. Despite reams of dialogue that tends toward the enigmatic if not downright opaque, the gothic melodrama is stretched too thin to have much grip.

The detractors are telling the truth. One review notes that Mother Mary eventually turns into "the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet's Vox Lux," heading "down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing." That is a legitimate response to a film that asks you to follow it somewhere and then, arguably, refuses to show you where that somewhere is.

Lowery, the writer, loses his way at points, making a film that he and Coel might fully understand, but that often cannot convey exactly what they mean to the audience. If you finish films feeling cheated by unanswered questions rather than opened up by them, that experience will register as a broken promise rather than an invitation. The abstraction can make even beautiful words ring hollow, which is ultimately the central risk of the film itself.

There is also the pacing. The first hour of Mother Mary is an extended conversation piece between two characters who don't always say what they mean. For one kind of viewer, that hour is everything. For another, it is a test of patience that the second half does not sufficiently reward. Mother Mary is not going to be a broad crowd-pleaser, even with its central character drawing inspiration from the likes of Lady Gaga and Taylor Swift. Lowery knows this and appears untroubled by it. Whether you share his equanimity depends entirely on what you came for.

The Performances as a Reliable Constant

Here is where the critical consensus holds, regardless of which camp you land in. The two lead performances give you something to return to even when the film itself goes dark between ideas.

Lowery and his longtime collaborator cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo stay tight on Hathaway and Coel's faces, especially enraptured by the expressiveness of the latter. Coel can shift from a warm smile to an embittered frown, and Lowery understands that her face often says as much as a monologue. Coel reportedly was involved in the process from a screenwriting phase, before being cast. That involvement shows. Her Sam Anselm does not feel like a role inhabited. It feels like a role grown from the inside.

Coel, as Sam Anselm, a maverick British designer with the arch intensity of Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, dominates the film. Sam talks quite a bit more than Mary, so Coel gets the lion's share of the monologues, and delivers them all masterfully.

At first glance Hathaway, who won an Oscar for her musical performance in Les Misérables, is not an obvious choice for the kind of risk-taking music superstar who can command arenas full of adoring fans. But she somehow creates the aura of an artist who has done exactly that, and is now paying the price for it. Hathaway draws a compelling parallel between the pop star on and off stage: during a performance, Mary is the goddess she is dressed up to be, while alone with Sam, her voice is shaky and hesitant, with the confident artist only poking through for a moment here and there.

Hunter Schafer, as Mother Mary's assistant Hilda, gets in some real moments particularly in the later going of the film. And FKA Twigs, also a key contributor musically, has some visceral moments acting-wise as Imogen.

Mother Mary would not work without the chemistry of Coel and Hathaway. The two sell the deep, profound nature of Sam and Mary's relationship in a way that centers the film. Their dynamic is its strongest aspect, and while they cannot overcome a messy ending, they give it its beating heart.

Whatever Lowery does or does not land with his metaphysics, those two women are worth the price of admission. Not because they save a failing film, but because they are doing something genuinely uncommon: two performers matching each other's frequency in a register that most studio productions would never attempt.

So. Should you watch it?

If you can sit with a film that refuses to solve itself, yes. If you have ever loved a piece of art more for what it could not quite say than for what it did, yes. If you want to watch Michaela Coel dismantle a room with her face while Anne Hathaway collapses in on herself like a dying star, yes.

And if you need a film to honour its own ambitions with coherent storytelling, to close every door it opens, to give you catharsis rather than vertigo, then Mother Mary will frustrate you in ways no performance can fix. That is not a judgment. That is a match.

The question it leaves you with is the one it is really asking: what do we owe the people who made us who we are? And what happens when the art outlives the friendship that built it?

Released in limited theaters April 17, 2026, via A24.

Watch this when the music you loved in a harder period of your life comes on unexpectedly, and you feel two things at once.