Mother Mary (David Lowery, 2026)

[Never Cursed]

This will be 2026, but David Lowery's Mother Mary has been rated R by the MPAA and is presumably done. Maybe it'll be one of A24's titles at Sundance?

[brundlefly]

David Lowery's Mother Mary. Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, FKA Twigs.

[therewillbeblus]

I know there's a ton of backlash but I don't hate it

While I like the more traditional pop songs she wrote for Lowery's Mother Mary a lot more, I can appreciate the oddly unmelodic, avant garde-ish vibe of that new song. It's not pitched to a mass audience they way you'd expect from a big pop star.

Didn't FKA Twigs write music for that film as well? Saw her in concert earlier this year and she puts on quite a show

[Mr Sausage]

She did. She also has a small role in the movie. I didn’t like her songs for the film as much, but that’s probably just down to me liking darker, moodier stuff.

[John Cope]

I was enthralled by this. With Her Private Hell the most inscrutable movie of the year and all the more glorious for it. For me at least not only Lowery's best film but a film about which I can say that his whole career was worth it just to get to this point.

Much of this is, rather famously (or infamously), an extended dialogue between only the central two characters whose relationship we only ever know to be an estranged one. Part of this then is a confrontation and working out of the details of that although always only in an obscured way which begs more questions than it ever answers. This coyness, however, this heightened tenor of the discourse and the performances, is never just some arbitrary and unfulfilled tease; it points to the film's deeper concerns. But how much "deeper" can any of these be? This is a film that is defiantly determined to remain on the surface as though there is no substance beyond that; this itself becomes a clue. It is a film made up of elusive and suggestive detail and that is all, elements of a reality intuited rather than fully articulated or systematized. The elusiveness comes to be seen as elusive for its own sake as its own signifier; here it recalls Atom Egoyan. But this evokes many parallels, from the similarly themed and irreducible Vox Lux and Velvet Goldmine to the work of Jonathan Glazer and with a visitation from In Fabric era Peter Strickland. It is the match of all of these in its refinement and rarefied sublimity. Pastiche here becomes transmutation.

Part of what is so remarkable about that is its whole cultural and social milieu, situated as it is within the realm of pop music star concert spectacle. Here though is where it really shines and demonstrates a profound intelligence. As it pivots between the enclosed and hermetic personal space with its intensely sustained intimacy to the grand scale expressiveness of the pop concert spectacles there are astonishing sequences in this that recall Greenaway for a recognition of how artifice extends offstage/backstage, enveloping reality. Along with Levinson's recent The Idol, this understands something very particular and far reaching about the nature of performance and artifice. Hathaway's extended dance without music is entirely about stripping down artifice to its bare component elements, to expose it for what it is in its multiplicity. Here that dance is purgation, flagellation, obsequious prostration, and the invocation of a reality. That reality is one in which spiritual and mythic connotations are folded in as they in turn radiate out from that enclosure. But when all is recognized as stagecrafted abstraction what can bear the weight of and responsibility for those connotations/associations, for being the repository of such meaning? Hathaway's character becomes an emblematic figure by default and must then be able to tap into a meaningfully transformative capacity. She is an icon that is into iconoclasm in order to craft a (re)new(ed) relationship both to her audience and the Coel character as representative of that audience in personal terms. The film's ending is the only part that seems unsteady but I think its diffuse porosity is entirely appropriate as it attempts to be all things at once, to bring it all together in a genuine reciprocity.

[Mr Sausage]

My wife read this as an extended symbolic confrontation between an artist and her own work of art, with all the ambivalence of creation bound up in it. On that level the film is surprisingly successful. It's rare for a film to be so non-literal in such an extended and committed way, especially these days. We're in a rather literal age where symbols, if they're used at all, are blunt and univocal, and here's a whole movie about pop culture that constructs an elaborate, ambiguous symbolic framework that you cannot understand the central drama without, and which grows in complexity as the movie progresses. I admire that even as I question if the film is as successful on its dramatic plane as it is on the symbolic. The thing is probably incoherent, but not fatally so, and it feels pretty alive, crackling with energy, even tho' it's layered with artifice and symbolism and other things that can easily stifle a movie or render it airless. A weird, weird movie. Happy I caught it in theatres.