David Lowery has spent his career straddling two worlds: intimate arthouse passion projects (“A Ghost Story,” “Ain’t Them Bodies A Saint,” “The Green Knight”) and big-budget Disney fare (“Pete’s Dragon,” “Pan and Wendy”). His latest, “Mother Mary,” clearly falls into the first category.
Filming for “Mother Mary” kicked off in May 2023 and wrapped as recently as August 2024. Since then? Crickets. No release dates, no marketing, nothing. Word is the movie might not hit theaters until 2026 — if at all.
The story revolves around Michaela Coel, who runs a “Phantom Thread”-style costume design house tucked away in the countryside. She made her name as the designer for Anne Hathaway’s character, a major pop star. But the two had a falling out years ago over an unspecified issue and haven’t spoken since.
Now, Hathaway’s character — sidelined by scandal and drug problems — wants to make a comeback and unexpectedly shows up at Coel’s isolated studio to ask her to design costumes for a new tour. And that’s pretty much the entire film: just these two women, stuck in a barn, arguing, with a few quick shots of the pop star onstage. Hunter Schafer plays Coel’s assistant, but she only has about ten minutes of screen time.
From what I’ve heard, the film doesn’t quite land. It’s almost entirely set in one location, which ends up feeling claustrophobic and dull. The dialogue isn’t sharp or engaging enough to hold that kind of focus, leaving things repetitive and aimless, with little payoff.
So here we are: A24 appears to have a misfire on its hands. A film with intriguing potential that ends up going nowhere. It’s “bewildering.” Not much really happens, and neither Coel nor Hathaway delivers a standout performance. It’s a movie about nothing, and according to those who’ve seen it, that’s exactly what it feels like.
Last fall at the Melbourne International Film Festival, Lowery gave a rare update on “Mother Mary,” sounding pretty baffled himself. When asked about his eighth feature, he “sighed deeply” and called it “a weird, weird film.”
“I wrote the first 20 pages when I was shooting ‘Peter Pan and Wendy’ and it’s been percolating ever since,” Lowery explained. “I decided I’m just going to do something simple. I need to do a movie with just two actors in a room having a long heart-to-heart… a really gentle filmmaking experience.”
“But then I thought, ‘What if one of those characters is a pop star? And what if we started at a stadium? Then it got bigger,” he laughed, “And, it wound up being the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
Around the same time, on The Last Video Store podcast, he admitted: “I’m in the edit right now and I have been wondering, ‘what is this movie?’. I know what I set out to make, and that is indeed what I’ve made, but it is so wild. It is a movie I am sure will provoke a lot of strong feelings, in every possible direction. It feels very true to who I am, and very close to me, but it is also consistently surprising me in ways that I did not anticipate. What I’ve got on my computer now is probably pretty much what it’s going to be, it will just get cleaned up.”