Mother Mary (Spoiler Review)

Editor's Note: The legendary Frankie Mara wrote this beautiful piece, full of context that will hopefully provide you with some extra, well-needed tools to appreciate this film even more. However, they were unable to finish it for personal reasons – I shall cap off the review with my own thoughts, fresh from seeing the film today. If you're in reach of their socials, send them some love and good vibes!

In the past few years, we’ve been seeing a lot of stories about pop stars. We’ve gotten thrillers like M. Night Shyamalan’s largely hated (I loved it what can I say) Trap (2024), biopics like Michael (2026), Elvis (2022), Rocketman (2019), and Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), concert documentaries like Taylor Swift’s: the Era’s Tour (2024), the upcoming Billie Eilish: Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (2026), and my all-time favourite (recently remastered) comfort-watch the Talking Heads’ Stop Making Sense (1984; remaster 2023). Heck, Charli XCX even blessed us with a semi-autobiographical satire flick, The Moment (2026)! 

And those are just the pop films I can think of off the top of my head. I think it’s fair to say that whether or not each of these films worked for you individually, we pop girlies have been cinematically blessed. 

Most recent to hit the silver screen is David Lowery’s Mother Mary with music by Jack Antonoff (there’s much to say about this man, but why give him the space? #TeamLena). In spite of the film’s music not being ✨the best✨, the songs were still catchy enough to sell the story, and Anne Hathaway is unquestionably believable as an ultra-famous-Kylie-Minogue-type pop star “Mother Mary.” In fact, in another timeline, we might have been blessed with such a benediction! But in this one, we are lucky to have Anne-shallah Hathaway as a movie star who plays a pop star, and for that, we should all be grateful. 

We learn early on that there would be no Mother Mary without Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), a fashion designer who gave Mary her iconic look early on in her career, bestowing on her a halo that becomes Mary’s signature look.

In the first act, Mary shows up at Sam’s workshop distraught, in need of a new dress for an upcoming event. And this is when the story really propels us into the dynamics of these two and their histories in a tight, claustrophobic drama that defies genre and leans gorgeously into colour, light, and shadow, the likes of which we haven’t seen much of since Argento’s Suspiria. The chemistry of these two co-stars is palpable. I could have watched them word-wrestle each other for another three hours (jk the runtime is perfect for this story).

Since seeing Mother Mary, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the story in relation to Mark Fisher’s Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology, and Lost Futures (2013). The idea of hauntology (first coined by French philosopher Jacques Derrida but later popularised by Fisher’s text) refers to the reminders in our lives about that which no longer exists; the futures that failed to happen; the ones that haunt our present. 

Hauntology often exists in the music we hear, the scents we smell, the places we pass by, but no longer belong to. In this way, hauntology is more about affect than about the literally supernatural. The ghost in Mother Mary is not (well, at least not fully) a spectre, but a feeling: a love lost, or perhaps more appropriately, a love that was never given the space to blossom. 

What’s fascinating about Lowrey’s film is that although the audience is given brief glimpses into the early relationship of Sam and Mary, we are never given their full story. In fact, non-WLW viewers may fail to read the film as a sapphic text entirely. But the hints are all there: in Sam’s carabiner necklace, in the old photo of the two pinned against a barn wall, in the psychic’s gentle touch. Lowrey’s direction crafts a hauntology not only of the future that will never be between Mary and Sam, but of the past spectres of their relationship that the audience will never know. 

In “The Sound of Hauntology”, Fisher writes, “hauntology has an intrinsically sonic dimension. The pun– hauntology, ontology– works in spoken French, after all. In terms of sound, hauntology is a question of hearing what is not here, the recorded voice, the voice no longer the guarantor of presence” (pg 120). 

And given that Mother Mary is about a pop star, the film is inherently sonic. Mother Mary attempts to show Sam her new single “Spooky Action” throughout their time together, but each time, Sam refuses to listen to it. She forces Mary to dance in silence. Sam later reveals to an astonished Mary that she has never listened to her music since their split– she has simply turned it off; a voluntary and conscious choice to detach herself from Mother Mary’s work and life. Every time Mary tries to rekindle, Sam chooses– (I believe) bravely– to disconnect. 

Sylvia Plath writes in The Bell Jar of the fig tree as a map of possible lives, each fig representing a different future. The tragedy is not that one fig is chosen, but that in choosing, the others wither and fall away. At its core, Mother Mary isn’t a ghost story; it’s a hauntology of a sapphic relationship that was never chosen, but instead left to wither and rot. 

Mary and Sam’s relationship exists as a rotted, fallen fig. What we witness is not simply what happened between them, but everything that didn’t: the life they (namely Mary) never claimed, the intimacy that never fully materialised, the version of themselves that could have existed outside the machinery of fame, image, and celebrity mythmaking. These absences linger thick in the air of Sam’s workshop, wrapped in the ghosts of costumes past, in the silhouettes Sam once constructed to shape Mary into the icon she became.

UMNIA's Footnote

Frankie's review gave such richness to my viewing of the film – armed with hauntology, I felt as if I held my breath and marvelled at the film at every turn. Of course, there are Sapphic churches everywhere for those with eyes to see, and yet two things stood out to me as being particularly poignant about the choices made here.

Mary, Halos, invoking ghosts and spirits – even the mention of Catholic sacrament as inspiration for a dress – seemed to hint at me why the love between these two women had to exist as a ghost. Repression, self-flagellation and resignation to fate become very, very loud themes when the film is seen through a religious lens.

There is so much love, so much chemistry and unspoken yearning for complete and consuming closeness, and two actors at the absolute top of their game.

Also, and I get to say this – it's not lost on me that Sam, the architect, the one who poured everything into them and got left in the cold with no credit, is a Black woman. So much of the grandeur of Pop music rests on a foundation of Black female expression, too often kept out of view. Credit becomes something of a luxury instead of a right. It wounds the first time. You learn not to let it wound you again.

What an absolute masterpiece of a film, and likely one to go over so many people's heads.