Mother Mary Movie Review

Some movies you watch. Some movies you feel. Mother Mary is the latter.

These days, it’s easier to just subject yourself to movies that are easy and entertaining. The ones you don’t think much about after seeing them. They require very little brain power, so you can just turn your brain off and enjoy. 

Whether the plot is ridiculous or just dumb, you watch them because it’s more about passing the time and disengaging from the real world and its many, many issues. 

But once in a while, you pick an artsy film that evokes something. The kind that still possesses the almost long-lost storytelling ability to hold your attention from start to finish and make you feel firsthand what the characters feel, their pain, motivation, and the full range of emotions. 

These kinds of movies need powerhouses to carry them—actors with magnetic personalities who make sure you never check the time during the runtime. 

I recommend watching at least one of these for every five brain-rot movies you sit through, especially if you’re a creative. It’s a great resource. Mother Mary was that movie for me.

Right from the start, you’re pulled in. You think you know where the movie is headed, but you don’t. 

The Storyline

Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) is a world-famous pop star (think a Lady Gaga/Beyoncé/Taylor Swift tribrid) on the verge of a comeback. She’s iconic, untouchable, and deeply alone in the way that only people at the very top can be.

On the eve of her comeback performance, she shows up unannounced at the door of Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), her estranged best friend (maybe lover?) and former costume designer, in a thunderstorm. She hasn’t seen Sam in ten years, and she needs a dress.

But she also needs something else, something she can’t name. Because somewhere along the way, after a violent onstage accident, Mother Mary came back from it changed. Haunted, literally. 

What unfolds over the next 112 minutes is essentially a long, brutal, deeply intimate conversation between these two women. They hash out a decade of buried wounds, unspoken betrayal, and a creative bond so intense it blurred every line. 

Sam helped build the Mother Mary persona from the ground up, the image, the armor, the mythology. And then Mary left her behind. 

Magnetic Casting

Anne Hathaway is one of my favorite actors. I’ve loved her since The Princess Diaries, and she’s spent the years since building a career that consistently surprises you. But this might be the most vulnerable I’ve ever seen her. 

She spends a significant chunk of the first half essentially on her knees, emotionally and sometimes literally, being taken apart by Coel’s Sam, and she holds every second of it without flinching.

Michaela Coel, though. 

I’ll be honest, outside of a small role in Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, I hadn’t seen much of her work before this. This film is my cue to finally watch her breakout series, I May Destroy You. 

Coel’s character is magnetic in a way that’s hard to describe without sounding like I’m exaggerating. The way she delivers a line, holds a moment of silence, or makes you feel like you’re watching something unfold in real time is exceptional. She’d make a terrifying villain someday. The bones are already there.

Together, Hathaway and Coel carry the entire film on their backs. The entire 112-minute runtime is essentially just the two of them. A handful of other characters appear, but they’re peripheral. They serve the plot and get out of the way. You barely miss the absence of anyone else, which is its own kind of achievement. 

What the Film Actually Is

When I first saw the trailer, I expected something darker. This is A24, after all, and the trailer had chalk circles, candlelit séances, and a ghost that apparently hitched a ride inside a pop star. I braced myself.

What I got instead wasn’t dark so much as it was literal. The film doesn’t hide its emotions behind metaphor or make you work to decode what it’s saying. It says it directly, through these two women, in a barn, in the middle of the night, dissecting each other with the precision of people who once knew each other better than anyone.

The supernatural elements are there, and they matter, but they’re in service of something more grounded. The ghost isn’t the point; it’s the grief and resentment. It’s the specific, complicated pain of watching someone you helped build walk away and become everything without you.

Some moments felt a little strange, but the film leans into it unapologetically. And somehow that commitment makes it work. In the wrong hands — wrong director, wrong cast — Mother Mary would have been another weird movie trying too hard to be artsy.

The Spiritual Undertow

The spiritual connotations run through the entire film, subtle enough that you might not consciously register them at first, but they’re everywhere. It’s in the imagery, the rituals, and the language the characters use with each other. 

There’s a sacredness to how Sam treats the act of making clothes, as if she’s building armor for someone going to war, and a desecration in the way Mary abandoned it.

The film is a vivid, theatrical depiction of loss, longing, bitterness, and eventually, the grueling work of forgiveness. It doesn’t rush any of it. It sits in the discomfort long enough to make you feel it.

Final Verdict

Mother Mary is not for everyone, and it knows that. If you want an easy movie to pass the time, the options are endless. But if you like your movies deep and introspective, if you don’t need everything explained to you, enjoy A24 offerings, and Hathaway or Michaela Coel, you’ll love it. 

Big bonus if you appreciate theatrical performances and filmmaking that trusts its audience. 

The entire film is a metaphor for forgiveness, creative ownership, love, resentment, and the complicated aftermath of a bond that meant everything to two people.

Mother Mary might not answer all the questions posed neatly, but it makes you want to find the answers yourself. 

Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel should win all the awards for their performance in Mother Mary. And the film should also win for its directing and visuals.