Anne Hathaway has had a great year. In 2026, she starred in one of the most anticipated sequels in Hollywood, played a key figure in Christopher Nolan’s magnum opus, and led the best and most inventive dinosaur movie since the Spielberg era. While juggling all of these blockbusters, she also managed to sneak in an incredible performance in one of the best psychological thrillers of the year. And it’s one that most people missed.
Mother Mary is the most recent film from director David Lowery (The Green Knight, A Ghost Story). Like Hathaway, he’s an artist who can fit into any genre, imbuing each new movie with subtleties that are instantly recognizable for fans of his work, whether it’s his elliptical editing or his preference for tactile in-camera effects. But Mother Mary may be Lowery’s most daring movie yet, and after quietly releasing in theaters in April, it’s finally making its streaming debut on HBO Max.
Mother Mary opens on Mary (Hathaway), a pop star going through an emotional breakdown. Days away from her much-awaited comeback performance, she escapes to London, showing up unannounced at the home of her former costume designer, best friend, and possible ex-lover, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). It’s been years since the two last saw each other, but it’s clear that they feel hurt by the other’s presence. Mary asks Sam to make her a dress, and they fall back into the creative but rocky partnership they know all too well.
All throughout, the film is stylish and unexpected. While it unfolds like a play for the majority of its runtime, with the two lead actors exchanging weighty dialogue within Sam’s cavernous costuming workshop, these moments are broken up by flashbacks and sequences of Mary’s concert performances. Hathaway wonderfully depicts the duplicity of her character. Onstage, she’s a pop icon, perfectly disguising her exhaustion and the physical toll of her work. Offstage, she maintains that fabricated magnetism via friendly but superficial relationships with the people in her life, who are all her employees. Her scenes with Sam show her unvarnished, her walls down, desperately trying to reconnect with someone who isn’t willing to open up, not yet.
For a filmmaker like Lowery, who’s directed sword fights, dragons in flight, and Western shootouts, a homoerotic exchange between two artists seems like a strange fit, but it’s not. At its core, Mother Mary is a ghost story, a genre that Lowery is well-versed in. As Sam opens up about the last time she heard Mary’s music, she talks about the eerie and liberating experience she had when she physically ripped out a presence that was haunting her body. When it left her and manifested as a ghost, Sam felt free from the pain of being left behind by her creative soulmate. But the ghost’s work was unfinished, making its way to Mary, haunting and inhabiting her instead. The film’s final act depicts its exorcism.
The way Lowery renders the ghost is a wonderful piece of filmmaking. Bright red and simple, the ghost morphs through different forms, from a piece of fabric drifting in the wind to a bright light hovering threateningly over the stage to flesh on the floor. Lowery imbues all of these scenes with meaning without revealing anything concrete. The ghost can be frightening or benevolent, but it can’t be ignored by either woman.
“I got some red clay and started sculpting maquettes to try to figure out what form I wanted to see. Not even to try to create a sculpture; I was just exploring, trying to look at different shapes, different objects, different transmutations of substances,” said Lowery in an interview with Polygon. He ultimately decided to collaborate with Daniel Wurtzel, an artist who works with fabrics suspended in the air, finding his style fitting for the look of a ghost that first manifests out of Sam’s grief and soul.
“It’s gonna sound like another metaphor even though it’s not,” Sam says at one point in the film. This is a theme that recurs throughout the story, providing viewers with the right lens to read a film that doesn’t want to state things plainly. Mother Mary is many things at once; it’s a contemplation on creative partnerships and the sacrifices they demand, a story about the aftermath of a breakup, and an act of letting go. After watching Hathaway dominate much of this year’s box office success, audiences can now catch her in a completely different register in Mother Mary. It’s perhaps her best performance in a year filled with incredible work.
Mother Mary is streaming on HBO Max.