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The other day, a friend told me that their friend overheard someone say that the new film Mother Mary is, “the ultimate gay-guy movie.” I take the point: the film is a baroque horror-drama about a hugely famous pop star mentally unraveling after a strange encounter. She reunites with a fashion designer who was once her friend and close collaborator and the two circle one another, one needing something (a dress, but really much more than that) from the other, the other not so sure she wants to give it. So, it’s two divas squaring off while spooky things happen around them. That does, from plenty of angles, sound like a pretty gay-guy movie—if not, perhaps, the ultimate.

But David Lowery, who wrote and directed the movie, is not gay. He’s a wonderful, sensitive filmmaker, whose work has been fascinatingly peripatetic across genres—the same guy who made Pete’s Dragon also made The Green Knight; the same guy who made A Ghost Story also made The Old Man and the Gun. He’s one of my favorites, I’d say, particularly because he is unafraid to earnestly probe at existential, keep-you-up-at-night anxieties about mortality; he listens to, and then renders on screen, the creak and groan of the planet aging (and, really, dying). But, again, he’s straight, and so I don’t know that we can give Mother Mary the exact credit ascribed to him by this person overheard at a screening. I think the ultimate gay-guy movie maybe should be made in-house. (Or a lady could do it. Has done it, in fact!) 

What worries me about such an assessment is that people who have not seen Mother Mary, gay guy or not, will hear a sentiment like that and think that the movie is in some way going to be a romp, that it will be a riot of fabulousness. And I just don’t think that’s what Lowery does here. There are arresting moments: striking visuals and lacerating performances and original pop songs by Charli xcx. But all of that is in service of something moody and somber and overwrought—just not overwrought in the fun way, really. 

Anne Hathaway, enjoying a little test-run before Devil Wears Prada 2 puts her right back at the center of attention, plays the titular pop goddess, a diva styled in the manner of Lady Gaga with some Lana del Rey thrown in. (Lowery has said he was inspired by Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” tour; I can see that in terms of Mary’s mega-stardom, but far less so in the styling and music.) Of course, “Mother Mary” is something of a synonym for Madonna, so we can’t omit that icon from the equation. Madonna’s whole deal, at least at the outset of her career, was that she was named after a famous virgin but presented as very much not that herself. Mary’s star profile, on the other hand, is relatively sexless; she is never seen on stage without a halo headpiece, signifying a holiness that transcends matters of the flesh. 

Yet the Wikipedia plot description of the movie reads, “The film follows the psychosexual affair between pop singer Mary and fashion designer Sam.” Maybe I’m totally naïve, but I didn’t see the “sexual” side in the film. There is an intense connection between Mary and fashionista Sam (a magnetic Michaela Cole), but it’s one that seems rooted way more in creative passion and the sting of betrayal than some kind of carnal longing. Again, I could have missed something glaring—or, just as easily, something slyly buried in the mix—but that plot description seems based more on assumption than anything else. 

And assumptions are a risky thing with this movie, which repeatedly refuses to satisfy expectation by doing anything predictable—or, maybe, desired. Mother Mary very much has a mind of its own, Lowery chasing down big ideas that perhaps loomed gloriously in his mind but are not quite meaningfully made manifest for the rest of us. What we see is a lot of fancy packaging for what is ultimately a fairly simple, and maybe even a little banal, story of one artist screwing over another artist and then paying for it karmically. 

Mother Mary is a movie about forgiveness, dressed up in the tones of a ghostly reckoning. What’s most pleasurable about the film is watching Hathaway and Coel go head-to-head. Their voices are rarely (if ever?) raised above a purr or a whimper, but they nonetheless communicate seething waves of guilt, resentment, terror, ache. Lowery has written a particularly flowery script for his actors to tuck into; Coel especially gets to tackle some ornate writing that might fit just as comfortably in the misty medieval world of The Green Knight. 

When what is actually happening in the story—beyond the two having a coded conversation in Sam’s countryside atelier—is revealed, though, all of that elaborate writing and acting and aesthetic splendor seems pretty outsized. “Oh, that’s all that’s happening?,” I thought as the veil was lifted and Lowery gave it to us straight. Well, not exactly straight; the movie remains steadfastly disorienting through almost the very end. But we can at least grasp a basic idea of the mystery at the center of the film, which anthropomorphizes resentment into a supernatural force. 

Kudos to Lowery for exploring one basic topic with such thorough, go-for-broke filmmaking, but Mother Mary doesn’t really coalesce into anything more than an intriguing, flawed experiment. It feels both over- and under-cooked, somehow, a movie struggling to find its proper shape as its director presses buttons and twists knobs with abandon. Okay, I say abandon, but there is a degree of control here too, a calm command governing at least some of the filmmaking. Which perhaps makes the flailing elsewhere all the more disappointing. 

Mother Mary is consistently interesting but not exactly gratifying. Hathaway and Coel sell the movie as best as they can, and they do some exciting stuff together. I’d watch a whole mini-series about Coel’s slippery, poetically minded fashion maven gliding through the world. Maybe that’s enough to convince you to buy a ticket (and to spend however much on babysitting, or gas, or gas for the babysitter), but let that be your guide rather than any broad declarations that this is the ultimate movie for anyone. I know it’s fun to get into hyperbole sometimes, and that movies—especially smaller, artier, albeit star-driven projects like this one—need all the hype they can get these days. But let’s not confuse the issue too much. Mother Mary is certainly gay-guy friendly, but it’s not the wild, campy, arch night at the movies such description would suggest. And we ought to respect that choice. 

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