Mother Mary

The devil doesn’t wear Prada, she’s out for a haute couture makeover in David Lowery’s (A Ghost Story, The Green Knight) peculiar mood board of fame, fashion, Einstein and ectoplasm. 

Anne Hathaway takes top billing as global pop icon ‘Mother Mary’. Onstage, her look is very Madonna-at-Coachella: spangly corset, fishnets, shiny fetish boots, topped off with her signature halo head-dress (props to costumer Bina Daigeler). Off-stage she’s more Lady Gaga, famously strutting the red carpet ‘wearing nothing but freshly poured honey’. But to Sam (Michaela Coel), her bitter, brutally rejected best friend and costume designer, Mary is ‘a malignancy’ and ‘a tumour’. 

So, when Mary comes crawling back, desperate for a new comeback dress to express her new era, only days before her biggest ever concert, Sam is determined to make her beg. 

Anne Hathaway is suddenly being chased around a luxury hotel by flying ectoplasm

A good half of the movie consists of a long, talky two-hander. Set in Sam’s cavernous atelier, it’s like a theatrical chamber piece with the two leads power-playing off each other. Both Hathaway and Coel are equally extraordinary to watch on screen and Hathaway is electrifying in a scene where she dances, as if possessed, to a silent track. What their characters actually get to say is less mesmerising. And once they finally reach the dark, painful heart of their split, you kind of feel like shrugging: ‘What? That’s it?!’ It’s like the movie thinks that too, because the second half pings off into a whole new freaky dimension where a wet and naked Anne Hathaway is suddenly being chased around a luxury hotel by some flying red ectoplasm. At this point it all goes a bit The Red Shoes meets Suspiria with a dash of Black Swan – at least it tries to. 

What’s it all about? You might well ask. That Mary’s comeback song, ‘Spooky Action’, refers to Einstein’s term for quantum entanglement may hold the answer – or it may not. Basically, it’s another enigmatic, supernatural head trip from Lowery. And it depends how far you’ll go to indulge him. FKA Twigs, who also supplies the songs, alongside Charli xcx and Taylor Swift’s co-writer/producer Jack Antonoff, makes a brief impactful cameo as a séance hostess. The underused support cast also includes Hunter Schafer, Kaia Gerber and Downton Abbey’s Jessica Brown Findlay. Like them, you might leave this feeling shortchanged. Mother Mary is all dressed up, she’s just got nowhere to go. But in an age of studios playing it safe, I’m simply glad that this kind of weirdness gets made.

In US theaters now. Out in UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Apr 24.