Published via Ecency

Mother Mary 🤔 where am I gonna start? Okay let me ask you this? Have you watched a movie that reach into your chest, grip something you didn't even know was sitting there unresolved, and just hold it just to make you look at it. Mother Mary is the second kind. It's the kind of A24 film that will split a room completely down the middle, and honestly, I understand both sides. But let me tell you what happened. Let me actually walk you through it, because this one deserves that.

The film opens with Sam Anselm — played by Michaela Coel in a performance that honestly should be illegal — speaking bitterly to an unseen listener, laying bare a sentiment that she deserves neither love nor hate. It's a cold, strange way to open a movie. No context nor warmth just a woman and her unprocessed grief dressed up as indifference and then — the film shifts to a dazzling scene with pop icon Mother Mary, performed by Anne Hathaway, singing her song "Burial" to a chorus of devoted fans.

The contrast is immediate and jarring and completely intentional. One woman in the shadows of something that broke her. One woman blinding in the spotlight. And the film quietly whispers — these two were once inseparable.

Before Mother Mary became the iconic pop star she is at the start of the movie, she and Sam were best friends, soulmates in the truest artistic sense. Mother Mary as the singer and songwriter, and Sam as the designer who created MM's image through fashion and fabric.

They made each other famous and then, at their peak, Mother Mary broke the relationship. She said she wanted to express herself differently and Sam, Sam had to watch the person she built walk away and keep shining without her, I felt that in my spine.

Mary is planning a bold comeback after a troubling onstage fall that had rumors swirling about a possible suicide attempt. In the days leading to her return, she frets over the dress she must wear — a piece that must somehow feel like her again. Her travels take her to London, where the urgency pushes her toward a reunion with the designer she hasn't seen in over a decade and so Sam and Mary are back in the same room for the first time in years and you can feel every inch of the distance between them.

Old resentments are laid bare as a vengeful Sam forces Mary to confront the end of their creative partnership. Despite launching Mary's career together, Sam was denied credit and cut out of her inner circle entirely. That detail lands like a slap the woman who dressed you, who built you, who poured her entire artistic soul into your image — erased. Like she never existed. I sat with that for a long time because I've seen versions of that story in real life. The uncredited woman, the invisible collaborator. It is one of the oldest and cruelest betrayals in creative spaces.

Then the supernatural element arrives, and this is where Mother Mary becomes something else entirely. When Sam goes to see Mary perform one last time, the pain cracks something within her. She grinds her teeth so hard her molars crack. After the broken teeth are extracted, something revelatory happens. Her open wounds become an escape hatch for the resentment that has literally been gestating in her body — taking the form of a swath of red fabric. A ghost made of grief. I know that sounds wild. It is wild but it is also one of the most poetic visual metaphors I have ever seen for what unprocessed heartbreak actually does to a person's body.

Mary then recalls meeting a fan named Imogen played by FKA Twigs — who leads her into a séance. The women summon a spirit that possesses Imogen, who takes Mary's hand and cuts it. The red ghost appears and tries to enter her wound, but Mary escapes — for now. During her last concert, the ghost appears again, causing her fall. Nobody can see the red ghost but Sam and Mary. Only the two people who shared that wound.

And then the ending. Oh my my, the ending. Sam leads a reluctant Mary in a ritual to exorcise the spirit using her dressmaking tools. Taking Sam's shears, Mary slices open her own chest and Sam pulls out the ghost — turning the spirit of their mutual trauma into harmless fabric. Mary apologises for having wronged Sam. Her team rushes her to the show and Sam, alone, crafts the red fabric into a dress.
The final look features a red dress made from fabric infused with the red spirit — symbolising transformation and release. The film closes on this eerie, image.

Art made from the wreckage of a broken relationship. Pain turned into something you can wear. David Lowery described this film as being about how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful and somehow, impossibly, it does exactly that.

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