Mother Mary

A24 MOTHER MARY 🔴 (2026)

The year of Anne Hathaway has begun.

Between Christopher Nolan’s epic The Odyssey, a collaboration with Ewan McGregor in The End of Oak Street, a starring role in a Colleen Hoover adaptation, and a return to high fashion in The Devil Wears Prada 2, Hathaway is moving with the kind of momentum that makes “busy” feel like an understatement. She’s not just working, she’s everywhere.

For her first film of the year, she steps into the hypnotic, shape-shifting world of an A24 production, alongside Michaela Coel, for something far more intimate and emotionally volatile.

What unfolds is a haunting, trauma-laced spiritual reckoning between two women who were once inseparable, now forced to confront the quiet wreckage of everything left unsaid.

Because in film (as in life) we rarely sit with the ending of a friendship. Romance gets the poetry, the closure, the spectacle. Friendship? It gets silence. And yet, losing a friend can feel like losing a version of yourself, the family you chose, suddenly gone without ceremony.

That absence is exactly what MOTHER MARY dares to explore.

Hathaway plays a larger-than-life pop figure (imagine Lady Gaga filtered through Taylor Swift) who reappears in the life of her former creative partner with a quiet but loaded request: design a dress that captures who she’s become.

Coel’s designer refuses. Not out of indifference, but history. The kind that lingers, calcifies, and reshapes everything that comes after.

What follows isn’t reconciliation in the traditional sense, it’s confrontation. Two women circling their shared past, excavating wounds, testing the fragile space between accountability and understanding. They don’t neatly resolve what’s broken, but they do something more honest: they acknowledge it.

The film pulses with contradiction. It's indulgent yet grounded, chaotic yet precise, a story overflowing with emotion but never collapsing under it. A truly intoxicating story of sisterhood.

There are moments where it feels like the film was designed as a high-fashion fever dream, to dress Hathaway in Met Gala-worthy looks that border on spectacle. But even at its most extravagant, the film never loses sight of what it’s really about: identity, intimacy, and the cost of being truly seen.

And when it lands, it really lands.

Because there’s a particular kind of power in being known by someone who has witnessed your worst and stayed anyway. That closeness can heal, or it can destroy. MOTHER MARY understands both sides of that coin and refuses to simplify either.

Yes, people grow apart. That’s inevitable. But the film suggests something more enduring beneath that truth, that real connection doesn’t vanish, it transforms. Sometimes into distance. Sometimes into protection. Sometimes into something unrecognizable, but no less real.

Visually, the film is stunning. Cinematographer Andrew Droz Palermo (The Green Knight) brings a dreamlike, almost otherworldly texture to every frame, while the sonic landscape (crafted by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX) blurs the line between film and performance art. At times, it feels less like you’re watching a movie and more like you’re inside a living, breathing concert-like experience.

There is one misstep, a scene involving FKA Twigs that aims to act as the emotional glue of the reunion but instead drifts into overly stylized, witchy mood-board territory. It’s visually on-brand, but emotionally hollow, and the film does feel that absence.

Still, Hathaway and Coel are undeniable.

Their chemistry is electric, their presence commanding. Watching them share the screen feels like witnessing two heavyweights in a quiet, devastating sparring match, each line delivered with precision, each silence carrying weight.

Even when the narrative wanders, they keep you locked in.

By the time it ends, MOTHER MARY doesn’t offer easy answers, just something far more valuable: recognition.

It’s a film about endings that don’t feel finished, about love that doesn’t disappear just because it changes shape. A haunting, deeply human portrait of friendship—not in its prime, but in its aftermath. 

Enjoy!

6.95/10 🍿 🎥

Runtime: 1hr52mins

Where: In Theatres

The Richmond Reviewer A24 Mother Mary Review - April 26th, 2026.