Movies & TV Mother Mary Mother Mary Might Just Be the Experience You’re Waiting For Is… is this what it feels like to be the invisible default? By Emmet Asher-Perrin | Published on April 27, 2026 Credit: A24 Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: A24 Filmmaker David Lowery made a lot of audiences very happy with The Green Knight, to put it mildly. While the writer/director has other projects in the pipeline—and many more before his second A24 project put him on a very specific kind of map, as it were—few seemed poised to fill that same niche for audiences until Mother Mary appeared on the horizon.  Are there similarities? Certainly. A dreamlike quality to the story itself, dialogue seeded with metaphors that birth the film’s imagery, intimate exchanges, and rarely more than two characters speaking to one another on screen at a time. But Mother Mary offers something that might feel far more precious to over half the population of the world: The chance to exist in a place where the thoughts and opinions of men are never once entertained, centered, or even acknowledged. Irony abounds, perhaps—it is written and directed by a man, as we know—but there is a weight of psychological relief existing within the frames of this film that is hard to express if you’re not accustomed to being on the other side of the equation. You rarely see a man on screen at any point in Mother Mary. You never hear a man’s voice, never have to reckon with the weight of their opinions or bend to a concept of “womanhood” that doesn’t fit the body you occupy. The story is this: Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) is a pop superstar of the highest calibre, but she’s having a crisis of personhood. Preparing for her next tour, she finds that the dress that has been designed for her doesn’t fit. She slips away from her entourage, producers, and handlers to find Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel)—a fashion designer and dear old friend(?) that she had a terrible falling out with. She begs Sam to make her a dress—but in order to get it, the two must rehash what went wrong in their relationship, and eventually find that they are haunted by the same red specter. While a great deal of work went into making Mother Mary a viable pop star within the realm of the film—the creative team talked endlessly of who they drew inspiration from, citing Taylor Swift (in 10-15 years), Beyoncé, and songs written by Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and FKA Twigs for Anne Hathaway to wail and sigh—I would argue that too much focus has been placed on that feat due to the massive amount of work that went into its creation. (It’s also a little strange that Gaga didn’t come up more frequently, as our very own Mother Monster, particularly given the inherent queerness of… everything in the film.) Mother Mary’s stardom is the backdrop on which the narrative flows, but it never once feels like the point of this tale. Having said that, it’s wildly impressive to create an entire pop star oeuvre for a narrative and have that persona largely do the work of set dressing? A feat unto itself, certainly. The places in the film where Mother Mary’s rise and fall come into focus tell a story that any fan can likely relate to—the way art often acts as a form of spiritual and religious experience, and what might happen to the people who embody that part. The name wasn’t chosen at random, after all: It’s an invocation, and the parts of Mother Mary’s act that we witness go through all of the greatest hits of that experience in high definition. We’ve got revelation, catharsis, renewal, ascension, sacrifice, deification, suffering—I could go on. There’s a hyper awareness around the fact that the uber act of pop stardom is a machine full of artists, using their bodies, their voices, their sweat and struggle, all for one person to get all the credit: A great deal of humanity loves auteur theory for reason. We cleave to the idea of one magnificent creature to raise above all others, their “vision” and personal genius shining a bright light in the dark. But outside of the trappings and halos and stadiums of fans, we are watching two women who are still reeling from the loss of each other. The script is wonderfully vague on the actual events that occurred in their past because specificity isn’t needed, but their desire is. We get to watch them toy with each other—though Sam arguably maintains control throughout, as the more wronged party who has been waiting for a chance to find the closure she deserves. The ghost that the two of them perceive may not be a true ghost in any traditional sense. She—because the specter is a she, they both agree on that—is created of Sam’s sorrow and abandonment, and the imagery around her formation is striking. Is she born of rage and loneliness? Is she the miscarriage of their dead relationship? Yes. Probably. Who knows. The film is replete with divine feminine imagery that never gives way to its usual “opposite.” As though the creative team had absolutely no care to ask whether that could be overdone, everywhere you look is another vaginal wound, clitoral folds of fabric with a pearl at the center, menstrual blood, fingering various parts of the body, wombs descending from the heavens. Moments that could feel phallic in nature are deliberately altered to that end: When they perform a seance, Sam uses her artist tools as symbolic objects to aid them—she dubs her needle as the sword to protect them. Penetration (and there is lots of that) never occurs with a phallic object of any kind. As far as this reality shows us, queer sex might be the only kind that exists. While I’m sure that someone out there is dismayed over the fact that no one kisses in the film, that there’s no outright declaration of sapphic romantic intent, it is impossible for this movie not to be queer, to be about women loving women, and hating women, and being unable to live without women, because—as I mentioned—men do not exist in this space. Is… is this what it feels like to be the default? Even as a nonbinary human, I have never felt more centered and actualized while sitting in a movie theater—this is a world in which girlhood and women’s art and the power of female and afab relationships is the only thing that ever mattered. A world where all girls do seances (look, they do). A world where losing those connections, platonic and romantic and everywhere in between, can destroy fundamental pieces of us (they do). It was an utterly alien experience to be immersed in a film that understood as much and had no interest in highlighting anything else. And I say this not to discount the incredible work being done by women and gender-nonconforming creators where men are present and important to the story—but it’s agonizingly rare for art not to spend so much time and focus and space (in the margins or not) dissecting the constant stress created by living under patriarchy and within its systems. We need a break now and then. The psychological relief is nothing to be sneered at. There are a couple of places where the pacing slips up a little, and there are real-world aspects to their relationship that the film is not interested in touching on, and I’m sure I could find more to criticize if I really wanted to—but I don’t. Mother Mary and Sam Anselm are beatific in every frame regardless of how they are feeling—tears spilling forward in shed emotion, hopeful and mischievous, sincere or putting on a show for one another. Their clothing choices, every design selection, is just right. We get to watch two impeccable performers egg each other on for hours, trying to one-up the intensity every step of the way. Coel is a hypnotizing force, who can make even the most abstracted dialogue sing. If you’re one of those people who gets up in arms about Hathaway’s earnestness and theater kid energy, I invite you (sincerely) to get over it.  Kneel at the altar of Mother Mary, and enjoy.[end-mark] The post <i>Mother Mary</i> Might Just Be the Experience You’re Waiting For appeared first on Reactor.