Sometimes red just symbolises a good napoli sauce
dir: David Lowery
2026
It’s hard to feel bad for mega wealthy pop diva superstars, but this flick tries damn hard to make us feel that way.
Mother Mary is a strange flick. When it starts, right from the start, we are put in a certain position because of the words we keep hearing uttered by a very angry fashion designer, being Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), who, due to the sheer magnitude of the hate she has for the star, can feel that she is travelling towards her.
Sam’s hatred is pure, and she wants some kind of revenge, and, initially, we are somewhat convinced that she is entitled to her feelings, if not her revenge. Her main beef is that she helped create this pop persona that Hathaway’s character rode to global success, and yet she was never credited for it and was cut off by the pop starlet when she made it big.
As it goes on a bit, though, I started thinking “is it reasonable for someone to feel entitled to a life long commitment from a Madonna / Kylie / Beyoncé / Taylor Swift type?” I mean, pop stars probably go through fashion designers the way that someone with a cold goes through boxes of tissues. I’m not discounting the work they would do: the iconic looks crafted for these divas that make them global icons have to be created by someone. And ‘created’ doesn’t mean being yelled at by a star until you somehow get it right: one has to craft the vision both of them see.
Sam’s business has flourished in the years that have passed since their estrangement, but from Sam’s telling she felt compelled to make her business succeed solely out of spite. Spite is a decent motivator for creative endeavours, no doubt. Such is her malice towards, uh, Mother Mary, that she intends to relish the fuck out of this opportunity to berate and humiliate this star, who has literally come crawling back. “You’ll come crawling back” is a thing someone yells as an ex departs, but they rarely, if ever, do.
But back she has come, and she is somewhat crawling.
David Lowery, famous for a bunch of weird but great looking films, seems a bit perplexed as to what the point of this flick is, I feel. He is trying to capture that feel of a top of the world performer, or like a melodramatic two hander where two actors are going at it hammer and tongs, but neither really succeeds. For all of Sam’s venom, and the relish with which Michaela Coel delivers her lines, this isn’t a flick where the banter between two characters is like a tense tennis match. Mostly it’s Sam spitting fire, and Mother Mary responding with wet newspaper.
And let me tell you, I would be terrified if Michaela Coel had a grudge against me, if I’d fucked up in some way that earned her wrath.
Kind of going against the theme of its own story, we go from wondering, and being almost awed by the purity of Sam’s fury towards Mother Mary, to thinking “damn, this nonsense has gone too far”, when they start playing pool of things happening literally or metaphorically. They even say it a few times, albeit sarcastically. And yet they go a few steps too many literalising Sam’s hate into something intangible but still somehow corporeal and physical.
So we go from watching a drama, to a story where a woman’s hatred, doused in a blood sacrifice, creates a spirit or a ghost, a red one at that, that attacks people, eventually attacking and invading Mother Mary, and giving her not a moment’s peace.
It’s hard to keep seeing things from Sam’s perspective, after that. What characters “deserve” doesn’t even seem to matter after that. I had felt indifferent towards Hathaway’s character up until that point, but I guess the makers wanted us to feel pity for her, and I did.
It’s hard to avoid all the imagery, all the references to suicidal ideation, to a desire for self-annihilation that she comes to represent. I don’t think we actually veer over into Black Swan territory, because in that flick a character drives themselves mad and to the point of death because of their pursuit of perfection in performance. Here Mother Mary seems like she’s going to annihilate herself because Sam’s hatred has manifested as a being that compels her to destroy herself from within.
It’s not enough that the demands of touring and performing take a toll on a star; now she has a gh-gh-gh-gh-ghost! trying to kill her as well.
What’s a girl (in her mid-forties) to do?
Well, when I’m dealing with the supernatural, the first person I’d turn to is FKA Twigs, who appears briefly in the flick, doing some séance-y shit with a Ouija board, and then turn to a fashion designer in order to be exorcised.
I hope I’m making it sound hokey and demented, because in a lot of ways it is, but in some other more visceral ways, it has a twisted logic to it, and these rituals they perform, with symbolism made real means any ritual they create can work because it’s real to them. Your tolerance for this kind of thing will vary. I didn’t take it literally so I didn’t have to suspend my disbelief as to whether this seeming sympathetic magic was “real” within the context of the film or not. It didn’t matter, for me.
It works (for me) if I accept that Sam realises she has gone too far, that her manifested jilted hatred for Mother Mary will kill her, and thankfully she realises that she doesn’t want that. It’s enough to hate her and crave to hear her say she’s sorry; no need to actually end her, aye?
Performance-wise it’s all about Sam / Michaela Coel; she dominates everything she’s in, but I can’t yet decide whether I actually enjoyed the dynamic between the two actors. Hathaway can be pretty annoying in certain roles. She approximates what she thinks these divas might be like, but she spends an inordinate amount of this film silently crying, even in scenes where it doesn’t even seem relevant. It only contributes to the feeling that her character is a bit of a wet noodle.
She approximates the look of one of these stars, but she doesn’t really seem to embody what many of them seem like. If you’ve read stuff written by the courtiers, the handmaidens and the general assistant to the assistant to the assistant hangers on of their entourages, you know that these people are nothing like the rest of us. If ever they once were, they left their mortal forms behind long ago when they ascended to the pantheon of pop stardom and insane wealth.
Many years after the fact I can’t help but remember that at one point in his life Elton John, famous pop diva of yesteryear, spent half a million pounds on flowers over a year. Flowers. And let’s not go into how much he spent on cocaine during the same time period, of course.
When Beyoncé wanted to film a film clip for one of her songs at the Louvre, they shut the whole place down so she, JAY-Z and her kids could stand in front of masterpieces for a couple of days.
They didn’t do that for me last time I was there. In fact I seem to recall getting beaten up by the security guards just for trying to have a sneaky smoke next to painting of an unimpressed Italian woman…
Bah, they not like us. And Hathaway never really gets to embody either side of it. She’s not entirely convincing as a star, as someone so charismatic that the world would go crazy for her, nor is she convincing as a ‘real’ girl with human feelings, foibles and needs who just wants to be understood or held by a ‘regular’ person, one of the common folk.
She does well enough though. The songs she sings… they’re pretty lame, and don’t sound really anything like the kinds of bangers that would get you on top of the world. I know that FKA Twigs and Charlie XCX contributed some of these songs, but there’s just something lacking with them, that tiny bit of inspiration that propels stars and their tracks to the stratosphere.
Otherwise it’s pretty good cosplay. I did love seeing Sam and her assistant Hilda (Hunter Schaffer, wish she got way more screentime) playing with fabrics, cutting textiles, working with cloth. You could almost feel it with your fingers, the tactile experience. Some of the costumes are sublime, and some of them mundane, given the needs of the story, but everyone (except Hathway, when she’s pretending to be one of the common folk) looks amazing, as you would hope.
I did somewhat enjoy the resolution of the story, resulting in a final red dress (that is terrible, and not wearable) that is rendered with the physical manifestation of what was killing Mary before, rendered harmless once Sam decides to (maybe) forgive Mary? But it was also quite pat, quite neat for something that seemed like it was going to go into gonzo maniacal directions and explode.
Instead, Mother Mary returns to her life, and Sam returns to hers, and that’s that. And so do we, none the wiser, and maybe a little bit hungrier?
7 ways in which Mother Mary comes to me, speaking words of pure venom, let it bleed out of 10
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“There may only be one of us left standing when this is over” – and it won’t be me! - Mother Mary
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