‘Mother Mary’ Review: David Lowery’s Feverish Take on Pop Superstardom

There’s nothing quite like a redemption story, especially when it involves a beloved pop star. Pop music has always promised resurrection: The comeback single, the dramatic reinvention, the moment when a pop star rises from the ashes of a tabloid scandal and reclaims her throne. Writer-director David Lowery’s (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story) latest feature, Mother Mary, understands the mythology of the pop star intimately. A filmmaker long preoccupied with the idea of legacy, memory, and time, Lowery turns his attention to the power of pop music, a genre that functions as a time machine unto itself, transporting listeners to specific moments in time or reassuring them that the future will be bright. As Lowery himself puts it, “Pop songs have the power to unite millions with shared emotion—they can make you feel seen and heard, even heal a broken heart. Mother Mary is about how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful.”

But there can’t be any conversation about pop music without acknowledging how we treat our pop stars. We uphold women like Britney, Amy, Whitney, and Janet as icons, only to gleefully tear them apart. In 2023, there was an epidemic of concertgoers throwing water bottles and other objects at performers like Cardi B and Bebe Rexha, who went to the hospital after a phone was hurled at her head. Late last year, Charli xcx—who was tapped alongside Jack Antonoff and FKA Twigs to create original music for the film—wrote on Substack that though being a pop star is “really f*cking fun,” she’s been finding herself “spending a lot of time inhabiting strange and soulless liminal spaces,” surrounded by people “determined to prove that [she’s] stupid.”

“Being a pop star,” she writes, “has always been partially about being a fantasy and obviously the fantasy is decided mostly by the consumer.” And there’s no fantasy the consumer loves more than the artist’s destruction and resurrection.

Anne Hathaway fully embodies the role of a tortured artist as Mother Mary, a larger-than-life pop star whose persona is a hybrid of Taylor Swift (one of Lowery’s inspirations was Swift’s tour) and Lady Gaga. Onstage in her platform heels and halo, she is an unstoppable force whose music has captured the attention of generations of devoted fans. Hathaway, who took voice and dance lessons in preparation for her role, is entirely believable as a woman who has spent years perfecting her craft, moving with a blend of military-like precision and freedom that only a seasoned performer could pull off.