Anne Hathaway Goes Full Pop Diva in ‘Mother Mary’: A Bold, Bonkers Star-Is-Born Remix
‘Mother Mary’ Review: Anne Hathaway Plays a Gaga Pop Star in David Lowery’s High-Concept Melodrama
Anne Hathaway’s Mother Mary reimagines the pop-star melodrama as a stylized, Gaga-tinged collaboration saga between a fame-obsessed icon and a visionary designer, delivering bold imagery, big swings, and a mix of soaring ambition and thudding pretension that will likely divide audiences.
Arriving in the middle of our current pop-culture obsession with biopics, pseudo-biopics, and “it’s not Gaga, we swear” musical dramas, David Lowery’s Mother Mary plays like a maximalist fever dream about the religion of celebrity. It’s part A Star Is Born, part Vox Lux, part fashion-couture fantasia — and, yes, very much a riff on Lady Gaga’s public persona.
Variety has called the film a “thuddingly pretentious fantasia,” and that’s not entirely unfair. But it’s also the kind of swing-for-the-fences project that keeps A24 and director David Lowery interesting: messy, self-conscious, occasionally transcendent, and never, ever boring.
Pop Stardom as Modern Religion: The World of Mother Mary
Lowery, best known for A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, has always been drawn to myth and spirituality. In Mother Mary, he swaps armor and bedsheets for latex and Swarovski, treating the concert arena like a cathedral and the pop star like a sainted martyr of the algorithm age.
Hathaway plays Mary, a global pop phenomenon whose image is as meticulously engineered as her stadium shows. She’s less a direct Lady Gaga clone than an amalgam of 21st-century pop divas: the theatricality of Gaga, the calculated vulnerability of Taylor Swift, the celebrity-as-art-project ethos of Madonna.
“The title character, a global pop superstar, could be based on a lot of people but is most directly and obviously a riff on Lady Gaga — maximalist dance pop as spiritual catharsis.”
Opposite her is Michaela Coel as Sam, a fiercely original designer whose sculptural costuming turns Mary’s body into a living, moving installation piece. The twist is that Mother Mary isn’t primarily a rise-and-fall music biopic; it’s a drama about collaboration, authorship, and the way fashion, fandom, and faith fuse in the pop arena.
Anne Hathaway’s Diva Turn and Michaela Coel’s Steely Counterpoint
If the film works at all, it’s because Hathaway and Coel commit so fully to the heightened tone. Hathaway leans into pop-star grandiosity: the feral onstage presence, the cryptic interviews, the almost parodic devotion to “the fans.” She plays Mary not as a secret introvert hiding under a wig, but as someone who only really exists inside the performance.
Coel, by contrast, becomes the movie’s anchor. Her Sam is prickly, grounded, and allergic to the circus surrounding Mary. Their creative partnership — part muse-and-artist, part interdependence spiral — becomes the film’s emotional axis.
- Hathaway’s high points: a fiercely choreographed tour sequence that feels like a full-on music video, and a post-show backstage breakdown that finally cracks Mary’s glossy surface.
- Coel’s standout moments: quietly negotiating her creative boundaries, and a mid-film confrontation where she calls out Mary’s appropriation of pain as aesthetic fuel.
There are times when Lowery’s writing makes the subtext blindingly text — characters literally monologue about the nature of worship and branding — but both actors sell the intensity, even when the dialogue courts self-parody.
Couture, Concerts, and Catholic Guilt: David Lowery’s Visual Fantasia
Lowery and his team stage Mother Mary as a series of moving tableaux. Concert sequences veer into full abstraction, with lighting and wardrobe doing as much storytelling as the script. The camera lingers on fabrics, veils, and outlandish silhouettes, turning each outfit into a symbolic layer of armor or sacrifice.
The aesthetic references are blatant but effective: hints of Gaga’s Born This Way era, the pop-icon-as-saint imagery from Madonna’s Like a Prayer epoch, and the cool alienation of Vox Lux. At times it feels like you’re watching an extended, extremely expensive music video — which is both the point and the problem.
“The movie so badly wants you to feel the holiness of the spectacle that it forgets to let the music and images simply work on you.”
When Lowery relaxes and lets the film sink into pure mood — a rehearsal bathed in red light, a quiet fitting where Sam literally sews Mary back together — Mother Mary becomes hypnotic. When he leans into verbal explanations of its iconography, it becomes, in Variety’s words, “thuddingly pretentious.”
The Sound of Faith and Fame: Pop Bangers as Confessionals
A pop-star movie lives or dies on its soundtrack, and Mother Mary clearly aims for the “fake songs that feel real” sweet spot. The tracks are written to mimic the arc of an actual pop discography: early-career bangers, mid-period experimentation, then stadium-filling anthems about survival, reinvention, and salvation through art.
The lyrics occasionally drift into on-the-nose territory — multiple choruses essentially announce “I am your savior, I am your sin” — but the production is lush and convincingly chart-ready. The film’s best musical moments let songs play out without cutting away to visual metaphor every five seconds.
Faith, Fandom, and the Cult of the Pop Girl
Where Mother Mary earns its place in the growing canon of pop-star movies is its willingness to treat fandom as a form of faith. Mary’s fans don’t just like her; they organize their lives around her, adopting her language and symbology, reading meaning into every costume change.
The film pokes at uncomfortable questions:
- Is a pop star responsible for the emotional needs of millions of strangers?
- When does “I see myself in you” become projection or possession?
- How much of trauma-baring pop is genuine, and how much is curated vulnerability?
By pairing Mary with Sam, the designer, Lowery also digs into authorship: who “owns” an image crafted by multiple collaborators? When Mary walks onstage in Sam’s creations, is she the artwork, the artist, or simply the canvas?
Where the Film Falters: When Ambition Tips into Pretension
For all its visual bravado, Mother Mary often feels like it’s explaining its own thesis to you in real time. Variety’s “thuddingly pretentious” label sticks because the script rarely trusts the audience to connect the dots without help.
The weaknesses generally fall into three buckets:
- Overwritten monologues: Characters deliver long speeches about art, sacrifice, and devotion that sound more like grad-seminar presentations than human conversation.
- Repetitive symbolism: Religious imagery — crosses, veils, stigmata-lite visuals — appears so frequently it starts to feel like a Pinterest board of “sacred aesthetics.”
- Thin characterization beyond the leads: Everyone orbiting Mary and Sam (managers, lovers, label people) reads as archetypes rather than fully realized figures.
None of this sinks the film, but it does keep it from achieving the messy emotional punch of, say, A Star Is Born or the unsettling chill of Vox Lux. You’re constantly aware you’re watching a capital-F Film making capital-B Big Statements.
How Mother Mary Fits into the Pop-Star Movie Boom
Mother Mary lands in a culture already saturated with pop mythmaking: A Star Is Born reframed the classic template for the streaming age, Vox Lux turned trauma into pop commodity critique, and documentaries like Gaga: Five Foot Two and Miss Americana traded on access and authenticity.
Compared to those:
- It’s more abstract than A Star Is Born, less concerned with realism and more with symbolism.
- It’s less vicious than Vox Lux, which approached pop culture like a moral horror film.
- It’s more stylized than most docu-style portraits, essentially treating every scene like an altar piece.
That makes Mother Mary an intriguing outlier: a film less interested in whether a pop star can love and be loved, and more in whether the entire structure of pop worship is spiritually sustainable.
Final Verdict: A Fascinating, Flawed Pop Opera
Taken as a whole, Mother Mary is a daring but uneven entry in the pop-star movie canon. It’s visually sumptuous, often gripping, and anchored by two committed performances, but it’s also self-conscious to a fault, so in love with its own iconography that it occasionally forgets to let its characters breathe.
If you’re interested in the intersection of pop, fashion, and faith — or if you simply enjoy watching Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel go toe-to-toe in a hyper-stylized sandbox — it’s absolutely worth seeing, ideally in a theater where the concert sequences can thunder the way they’re meant to. Just be prepared for a film that preaches as much as it performs.
Rating: 6.5 out of 10 – A gorgeous, occasionally profound pop opera that sometimes mistakes symbolism for soul.
For further details and industry context, you can read the original coverage at Variety or check the film’s listing once it’s live on IMDb.
