The lives of super-rich singers and actors are populating a lot of our movies lately, to varying impact. Maybe it’s linked to a post-pandemic world, this idea that the rich and famous are still human and we must be reminded of it somehow, while Instagram insists otherwise. This idea is predominantly appearing in horror – Smile 2 inventively choosing to rehash the plotline of its first outing with a world-famous pop star falling under the same curse. The Substance’s Elisabeth Sparkle was an Oscar winner, and even looking back to The Exorcist, with Chris MacNeill being a famous actor. The message seems to be that we’re all the same, and the real-world impacts everyone. No matter how famous MacNeill was, it didn’t help much when it came to the grisly matter of her daughter’s demonic possession. Her fame offered slim protection.
Mother Mary follows a similar premise. Demonic possession shows up too, but not until after the bare bones of the plot are established – Anne Hathaway’s ‘Mother Mary’ is a music A-lister fully immersed in her downtrodden era after an unspecified event, and seeks the help of her ex-costume designer and ex-best friend Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Turning up at Sam’s mansion in the pouring rain, Mary needs an outfit that “feels like me.” And the similarities with The Devil Wears Prada 2 effectively end there.
Whoever joined together this eccentric double act deserves a raise. Watching Hathaway and Coel’s characters collide is extremely powerful, their chemistry together brilliant despite the pair’s vastly different filmographies. Effectively, it’s a power play that lives and dies on how well the lead actors work, a two-hander that’s so dialogue-heavy at the start, it feels like it would work well onstage, so Coel’s theatre background is superbly pitched for it.
Writer-director David Lowery owes a lot to many films that came before this one. Victorian Gothic is emulated from the beginning – with Coel’s character explicitly mentioning that she’s gone a bit “Miss Havisham.” The Red Shoes is in here too, in fact most of the Powell and Pressburger oeuvre, and Under the Skin with some of the second act’s more atmospheric scenes. When Hathaway sits stewing in a bathtub in the dead centre of pitch-black nothingness, you half-expect Scarlett Johansson to come slinking past while Mica Levi’s quirky score plays overhead. Weirdly, the roster of 2020s music documentaries (aka Katy Perry and Taylor Swift) seem to have influenced some choices, and even 1939’s The Women – it’s obviously intentional that not a single line of male dialogue exists, failing the Bechdel test backwards in a very cunning fashion.
Despite all these nods to earlier films, however, Mother Mary is still its own entity, with very odd, very mesmerising visuals even if the plot wanes thin as it progresses, as the third act loses its way, and becomes harder to pin your attention on it as the premise gets bogged down in the supernatural, but it’s still a breath of originality in a sea of remakes and sequels. If you want a modern ghost story with two razor-sharp performances front and centre, look no further.
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