Mother Mary (2026)
Mother Mary: Art, Trauma, & Collaboration
In this episode of All Those Moments, we dive into Mother Mary, David Lowery's allegorical character study about creativity, betrayal, and the ghosts we carry with us.
We discuss David Lowery’s maximalist approach, the central relationship between Mother Mary and Sam, and why Lowery's ninth feature film plays more like a black box love story than a horror film. Along the way, we explore the meaning of the red “ghost,” the role of performance and religion, and how the film turns trauma into art and art into healing.
-
Mother Mary — Full Episode Transcript
00:00
It's been a week since we watched Mother Mary at the Magic Lantern. Where were you at immediately after we watched this movie? I was just sort of awash in the metaphor of everything and how deeply allegorical it all is and how it's one now having watched the Green Knight pretty recently. That's just like a movie where you can't even really necessarily tell like most of the characters motivations. It's just it's so deeply allegorical. so maybe this is just me
like the English major in me. Like movies like this, I'm more okay with whatever flaws people say they have. whatever- You're more forgiving of it? More forgiving of flaws because maybe coherent storytelling isn't the point. I think it's decidedly not the point when it comes to David Lowery. He did this with a ghost story too. He was like, I hope people get something out of it, but I left a lot in there for them to sort of take in whatever direction they wanted. I don't want to treat it with kid gloves. Yeah.
but I'm so forgiving of directors that take these huge swings because I'm just like, yeah, let's go. I don't know what you're up to. You might not know what you're up to and I've got notes about that, but like this was super enjoyable and I kind of feel like the Grinch and my heart grew three sizes because I listened to the Mother Mary soundtrack so much while preparing for this podcast. Back to Lowry and enough about me, there's this kind of innocence. I would almost describe it as like young adult fiction quality to some of his movies.
They're very earnest. They're very beautiful. There's a lot of whimsy and romantic joy that I associate with young people. Mother Mary had a lot of those things, but what I felt during my first experience of it, I can't wait to rewatch it, is something that went through many, maybe I'll put in parentheses for now, in pencil, too many iterations, revisions, rewrites, edits, whatever. It just felt like it didn't quite cohere for me as a movie going experience.
I enjoyed talking about the movie afterward, probably just as much as the movie. I do also want to say, I want to shout out that the audience that watched it with us and Sky, Aaron with an E, Aaron with an A and Mike, thank you all for coming to watch the movie with us and sharing your perspectives after the movie. also felt like, and this is a very Christian thing, that like your perception changed in community. I am so completely breathless about it right now. It got me.
02:27
I honestly feel like this movie took me by the shoulders, slapped me across the face a couple of times, and then gave me a hug and let me go. It had a lot of messages that I actually needed to hear now, which is like letting go. And even those moments of peak, they followed it up with the stegata legato between the two actresses, which I thought was just so smart. Just the character development and seeing a film that's primarily just two actors in a room and be that powerful, really quite something.
I would say in general, did work for me. did like third act, it did kind of trail off into twin peaks-ish kind of territory, a lot of visual metaphors and the marketing in is a horror film, but it's really more of a character drama. Yeah, Breathless. I just felt like it was like so electrically charged. Like there was just this like electricity in it. And I guess I kind of expected it to be more of a horror movie.
So don't know that it worked as a horror movie for me, but I kind of left feeling like I watched a love story and I liked that. So yes, yeah. The movie is called Mother Mary. This podcast is called All Those Moments. I'm Benji Wade. And I'm Luke Bunker.
03:45
Golden
03:49
In time
Luke, tell me all about this movie. Let's start with the log line. Long-Buried Wounds rise to the surface when iconic pop star Mother Mary reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer Sam Anselm on the eve of her comeback performance. So, cast, Mother Mary is an almost entirely two-hander starring Anne Hathaway as the titular pop star, Mother Mary and Michaela Coel.
as a kind of a scene stealing. I mean, Michaela Coel, everything she does is a scene stealing performance, but as Mary's former fashion designer and longtime collaborator, Sam Anselm. Mother Mary was directed by 45 year old Milwaukee, Wisconsin native David Lowry, it is technically his ninth feature film. Lowry is probably best known for his 2016 Disney remake of Pete's Dragon and a pair of A24 movies in 2017. That was a ghost story starring Rooney Mara.
and Casey Affleck, and then in 2021, The Green Knight starring Dev Patel. He also wrote and directed The Old Man and the Gun, which we talked about a little bit, Robert Redford, Sissy Spacek, and again, Casey Affleck. The score was composed by Daniel Hart, and all of the original songs were performed by Anne Hathaway. Most of them were written and produced by Jack Annoff and Charlie XCX. One of them, though, My Mouth is Lonely for You, which I think is the standout track, was FKA Twigs. Can we get this out of the way now, Luke? What?
I am one of Charlie's angels. Okay. Do know what that means? No. For Christmas, my daughters, Greta and bought me Charlie XCX Double LP Brat on vinyl. okay. Shout out Resurrection Records. Okay. Yeah. Sweet. Yeah. I love Charlie XCX. me too. And it drives my kids crazy. I mean, you're an electronic music guy from way back. man. all that. Totally. Yep. I listened to an interview with David Lowery on the big picture with Sean Fantasy, and I thought it was really interesting.
05:46
He's, he said that this all his movies kind of start off as like a simple idea. The script for a ghost story was quite famously only 30 pages in length. But then every time he does a movie, they become more using his words, not mine maximalist. And this one, I think probably started off as a conversation that he had described that he was having with himself while making the green night. He was struggling. He was going through a bunch of physical stuff. Could have been COVID. was trying to read between the lines because of when they filmed it.
He also had a wisdom teeth that was coming out and cracked kind of like the character Sam in this movie. And it went from being a kind of on page chamber drama to becoming something obviously far bigger than that, which is the same thing that happened with the ghost story. It starts off as a simple idea and then just grows in magnitude and scale, which is something that I think is just a nature of who he is as a filmmaker. Well, this is one of the interesting things. So I read kind of like snippets of some
pretty negative reviews. have been, you know, Richard Brody at the New Yorker, like some, you know. did he crap on this? He didn't love it at And the ones who really don't like it all describe it as like a chamber drama or as a two-hander. And I think it's like, yeah, that's, I guess the kind of the DNA of it, but it's, it is the sort of the maximalist elements that he adds in that are in my mind, kind of uniquely David Lowry. want to talk about, Lowry is kind of one of one.
across like the way he uses sort of Catholic imagery in both this and the Green Knight. Well, to put Brody in context, one of his favorite movies of last year was the movie of our friend Carson Lund, Ephus. It was like one of his favorites just to show you like where he's going to be coming from. But Lowry does this thing where he'll show edits to people, people he trusts, and then they'll give him some feedback. And he doesn't immediately just jump on the first grenade that's thrown his way, but it festers and eventually he'll go back and start tweaking things.
And I felt that there was too much of that in play with Mother Mary. And I'm not trying to jump on an early critique of it here, but from producer Kayla, after seeing the movie they had cut together, Lowry decided to change a few things that weren't working and due to not being able to reshoot, he was forced to use footage from the green night to finish the movie. Which is super, super wild.
08:04
Let's take a quick break. When we get back, we're gonna go over all those moments from Mother Mary and there will be nothing but spoilers, so you have been warned.
08:16
Benji, you are a carcinogen, a tumor. Love and hate, you deserve neither. Jesus, Luke. You don't mean that. Don't I? Do you mean that? Don't I?
Those are in fact the first words we hear in David Lowry's newest movie right before and we hear like vinyl crack underneath it I'm like what is going on here? right before we see Anne Hathaway at a concert getting ready to perform a song and My first confession that I want to make I have sinned I Started to giggle a little when I saw the reveal of Anne Hathaway. Okay, is that terrible to admit? I why just cuz you didn't I was like
Oh God, I was just like, I saw the trailer. So it's not like I didn't know what to expect, but it was like this Gaga ask 1988 ish version of Madonna, something about it. It's like, but it's Anne Hathaway. And there's like the first movie I ever saw with Anne Hathaway was called Nicholas Nickleby. Like I have a very different sort of mindset when it comes to who she is, her star persona. Yeah. Anyway, but okay.
I did remember her performance of I Dream a Dream and Les Miserables. Shout out Tom Hooper. I know everyone hates that movie.
09:46
I kind of fucked with that movie because I in part loved her performance of that song and she was great. I was like, Oh, also hilarious watching Russell Crowe try to sing as I recall. And I don't like Hugh Jackman's vibrato, but we can get into that a different day. but I did, I stopped and went, she can do this man. And you know what?
Then we hear Anne Hathaway for the first needle drop of the movie. It's a song called Burial. It's a fucking banger. And I was thrown back to watching a Tate McCray concert, the Miss Possessive Tour with my wife, sister, and two daughters last summer. I was like, this is giving me hits of like how much I think that might've been the best concert I've ever been to, by the way. Hathaway looks amazing. And I feel like, all right, I'm transported. I felt like the first five to 10 minutes of that movie were just like note perfect. Did you feel that way?
I mean, I kind of liked the movie a lot more than you did. OK, OK. I I loved it. And I think, you know, this is where I'm I don't even know how much we're going to be able to be in conversation about some of the things I care about, because like mom and dad are going to fight on this podcast. Well, not even about us disagreeing. It's just like I'm sort of like I was awash in just like a lifetime of my own sort of Christian imagery in the time that I spent kind of.
in a evangelical church and then going to a Catholic college. And from the very beginning, I was, I've always felt a number of things. One of which is like, there's this line in the Bible that my dad quotes all the time. It's from the gospel of Matthew in the new Testament for where two or three gather in my name, there I am with them. the idea being that like, and the way that it was interpreted in the church I grew up in was like God's omnipotent and whenever, if you and I are talking about him, then God's in the room here with us. think
The other thing, the other way you can take that and the way that I think more sort of humanistic representations of Christianity take it is that like God is in relationships. God is in love. God is in this unique thing that humans have that in either a degree, a difference in degree or a difference in kind is different than what other animals have. It's this ability to sort of imagine but not fully grasp the infinite, the ability to sort of
11:59
imagine sort of states of being other than yourself without ever being able to fully imagine the idea like perfection. And a lot of that in the Bible, you know, and in, you know, modern Christian imagery and just in life itself comes through this divine act of love, not necessarily like the love of God, but like the love between people. that's
for me as a former recovering music journalist, I feel that sometimes in really amazing concerts where I just feel like one. It's an almost Buddhist feeling or just a feeling of like I am a part of everything around me. And that's a really beautiful feeling. The creations of the two characters in this movie ends up feeling like it was born out of a religious experience that they were sharing. I like the idea that you're describing almost of, especially like concerts, it's also a way of describing
the feeling that people have going to sporting events. We all enter into this kind of trance like state together. So it was kind of a religious experience. I love that. Mother Mary is a global pop star. We figured that out instantaneously. We realized that she's coming. She's making a comeback performance and recovering from some mysterious onstage accident. Some notes from producer Kayla Taylor, Swiss reputation, Beyonce's homecoming and the music of Lorde all inspired these films performances and what
David Lowry was super interested in. Budget and Ty made it to where they did their best to make this one song the ultimate performance. So they played Burial several times. had enough time to perform this over and over again so they could capture it from different angles. Their concert scenes were filmed at a real stadium in Bonn, Germany. I felt like it had to be real and it felt like, and I guess, know, a lot of this was like silhouettes of people, but it felt like actual extras. Did it feel real, real to you? Okay, yeah. So it was...
They had a kind of five night residency style setup where they had full control of the venue with no other competing events. They replayed the same song over and over again in front of, it was 400 extras or as David Lowry described it, a congregation throughout those five days so they could get it just right. So after this opening performance, we cut to a quiet, surreal countryside setting. Mary arrives to see Sam, played by Michaela Coel.
14:11
And the tension is instantaneous because the first words from Mary are, Sam, I need a dress. Sam says, you should have called Mary responds. Well, would you have answered? And we're like, this is going to go sideways quickly, which it does. We might not have realized it then, but that was a snapshot of what we would hear nonstop for the next 30 minutes, which it becomes a kind of verbal chess match. I would describe it as sometimes more ping pong than chess. Mary needs Sam to design a dress for the show that she's
about to perform in and Sam pushes Mary about the mysterious accident. Again, it's referenced and the performance where that accident occurred. This whole section is so wordy, very, very wordy dialogue from Lowry and the number of lines, they just come one after the other. I know you didn't love this, but I'm just a sucker for the repartee. I know it's like... No, I didn't dislike it. did it become too much? Ultimately, that's a matter of taste.
She has these great lines though. You know, when we talked about this in the movie, sorry not to cut you off, like Lowry for a guy who wrote a script that was 30 pages is really writes beautiful dialogue. I totally agree. Yeah. More than sort of any other critique I have about movies is when the dialogue doesn't work. Yeah. It's like, that's the thing that grates on me like more than anything. And again, it's like this is, it's a, it's a maximalist dialogue. think it's the best way to describe it. It's a very like perfect.
you know, back and forth, Ted, a Ted, these people. And the ideas that these people have been thinking about what they might want to say to each other for, you know, the time of the decade they've been apart. maybe Michaela Coel's character, Sam Anselm, has thought about it a little bit harder than Mother Mary has because Sam's very much on the attack. I really actually what you just said is a really good defense of how much this dialogue just keeps pouring out, especially of
the Sam character. That's a really good way of describing it actually that she's been kind of almost constipated for the last 10 years of just these ideas has been burbling up and she's ready to puke them all out over I'll say poor Anne Hathaway in quotes. She has these great lines all over the place though. That's where I'm going to feel weird agreeing with you but then saying was his dialogue almost too good? Yeah. There needed to be a little, I felt like there was a need for some of their dialogue to be plainer.
16:38
my God, was that Zinger or was that the Zinger? Was that the setup or was that the what the fuck? just got a little like she would say things like catch me by surprise by your sincerity. Just a great line. and by the way, Michaela Coel's voice was giving me chills. was like, dude, I'm not an ASMR fan, but I was getting goosebumps. Yeah. I was like, please go do some audio books. I will buy whatever.
the topic on Audible just to listen to Michaela Coel's voice. And she's always been a really captivating performer. I mentioned the TV, the British TV show Chewing Gum, that was sort of like her version of Fleabag. It's what put her on map. created it. She's a much younger person. I think it's from a decade ago. She was she stole the show there as well, but in a much more sort of frantic and what felt like it sort of a youthful performance. She's I have not seen her in a ton of things since then, although I
really love her as a performer. she felt pretty controlled here. I thought her performance was amazing. I'm super sad I haven't seen chewing gum. Lots of people shouting it out, but she is one of the most striking looking human beings I've ever seen in my life. Incredible. So Mary's like, my current dress is all wrong. The assistant played by Hunter Schaefer, whose name is Hilda in the movie, is taking notes in a kind of interesting but almost wordless role. Yep. There's a great edit where
Sam says, can you stop time? Snaps her finger. It's this great edit where the door to a huge garden opens up and they enter what I would describe as like a medieval fitting barn. Yeah. I don't know. I'm not good with words sometimes, Luke. See, I'm not like David Bowie. I it literally is a barn that she has turned into her studio, you know, her creative space. I mean, this is the other thing. Well, she's almost non-verbally going through the paces of I'm apparently going to make the dress.
So, yeah. This is another piece I think is interesting along with the dialogue is like, these are two artists who are, you know, at the top of the game in different ways, one of whom her body, her voice, everything is part of the art product. And Michaela Coel is this person who's effectively a shut in and dresses other people. So those are like just fundamentally different kinds of art expression.
18:52
that I think are, it's really interesting to sort of think about the kind of artist each one is and the way that they perform their roles in relationship. In the movie, I think does such a great job of both foregrounding the people who are typically in the background, but there's thousands of them that are employed to build the persona of one of these like supernova stars or.
pop icons, you know, and it's so easily taken for granted. This is where we get the first drop of like mystery of what's going to be made. The topic of the color comes up and she says, whatever, whatever you want, but not red. And of course, narrator, it's going to be, it's going to be red. Obviously this dress is going to be tied to one specific song. Mary has an almost PTSD response to a playful gesture with scissors. And we're like, boy, this, this mysterious accident that happened.
We learned more about it. Apparently it was caught on video and fans on Reddit or wherever were speculating. Did she trip? Did she jump? Again, we're just getting peppered with this information. Watching this fearless and almost overpowering character of Sam totally preying on Anne Hathaway is Mary. I'm not gonna lie. I found it kind of awesome. Yeah. I don't know. It was really fun. It was like a cat playing with a mouse. Sam chooses red fabric, of course.
We get the vinyl sound underneath again and Mary sees the red fabric. She's calm. She's resolute. She says, no. They move on to talking about crowns and halos, things in fashion that I don't understand, Luke. I'm just going to pretend. I wish Aaron was here to backfill some of my stupidity with this stuff. But also David Lowry loves halos. He loves fashion. This is all about halos, a very Byzantine form of halo, the kind of halo you'll see in you know, in like Istanbul, but not as much in Rome. A very flat.
Byzantine style of art. If you remember, the crowns in Green Knight are also halos exactly like that. OK, interesting. Mother Mary, her whole persona is like built around like this religious iconography. It's like a little bit transgressive, but it actually kind of seems like it's not that transgressive. she's not like subverting Christianity the way they're like Ozzy Osbourne and half of metal bands do. It's more it's this weird sort of like.
21:12
reverence girl powery thing and it doesn't really get into it much but at this point she's like I just want to be done with the halos, you know, That's right. Okay, that's that was her thing and then Michaela Sam and Psalms says something like well, but like that was basically that was her signature She was the inventor of the halo and that has carried Mary through got it So she's like, I'm not sure I want to let go of that right you might want to turn the page But I'm not sure I want to and it's there's a little bit of a like a twist of the knife there where like that is
That is, you know, in some ways Sam's intellectual property or that's her contribution to this character's persona. then when Mary bails on her, the halos keep coming. It's just other designers that are doing the halo thing. And so it felt like it was a, that's like one of the betrayals that they're working out.
You basically, you stole my contribution to your artistic vision and then let other people play with it. I'm to come back to that because the topic of the work that Sam had put into building the persona of Mary being appropriated, not only just by Mary, but also by the press and other people really pissed off Sam over the years. says she wants clarity, peeling away old skin, barnacles, dead hair, all the old youth. This is again, that cold voice just doing a number on me. I'm just like, God, just keep talking.
This is why I'm like, I'm not sure I'm critical of the first 30 minutes at all. At one point, Sam says, you want me to make you into a knife? And Mary says, I want to have a point. Great. There's some just really good lines. They're all over the place. So the thing that you're alluding to is coming up and it was probably my favorite part of the movie, the topic of singing happy songs and how that can't last forever. Basically Sam shoots back. It's more or less what people pay you for. So quit or do a good job. You give people the gift of giving a shit about you.
Again, you're right. This writing, I got tired of trying to write down great lines because there were so many of them. So that first description of the barnacles and everything, all the accretion of Mary's career to this point, that's her first serious stab at how she might make the stress. And she's talking about, yeah, it's like everything and maybe the train's a mile long. And then all of sudden it falls away and then your new persona comes up. as I'm sitting there, I'm like, well, that's just a really
23:27
cliche idea. And then that's what Mary says. Like, is like, that's it. Or isn't that kind of done or whatever? Like, yeah. And so there is a, there are moments, they're not maybe enough of them for me, but of self awareness where it's almost a little self deprecating. Totally. But then, so what, way I interpreted that over time was she then like right after that, when Mary's like, I want to play you the new song that we're going to wear the dress for. And Michaela Coel was like, no.
I do not want to hear the song. When that moment happened, I was thinking, God, maybe Sam Anselm has lost her edge because the destruction of this relationship also destroyed her creativity. There's a sense that a few things she says in this, back and forth, that is that like she's sort of been in the wilderness since Mother Mary dropped her, but she also is living again in like a.
like you were saying, an English castle in the countryside. So she's got to be doing okay for herself, but maybe creatively in the woods. And so we don't know much more about like either of these characters. We don't know, you know, the literal accident that befell Mother Mary. We also don't know where Sam Anselm's head's been at for the last 10 years, except really pissed, you know.
So we find out there's a young performing artist named Mielle Contrera and she poses kind of a threat to Mary and Sam picks up on that and that they're gonna perform together at this upcoming concert. And Sam says, you're gonna lay waste to her. Contrera is played by model actress Alba Baptista. Sam's plotting what will happen at this performance with Mary and Contrera. I was kind of.
taking notes going, Mary Contrary, Mary Contrara. She'll sing Paper Moon and it'll be beautiful. And then the lights will go down and you're going to sing your new song. This feels very stage play. It's intensely confrontational. I think Mother Mary is going to be performed in black box theaters for a million times. my words. I so. We'll talk about this later. Like the way Larry shoots it is like a stage production that's been put to film.
25:25
Right? You get the sense almost that he's ready to package this thing and get a bunch of people to start producing it in black box theaters all over the world. Sam doesn't want to hear this song. She says, I want to make a dress for you, not the song. She then compels Mary to dance, but without the music. Cause Mary keeps saying over and over again, I'm just going to sing it. I'm just going to play it on my phone. I'm just going to whatever. She's like, no. So she does this performance. Really intense performance. Yeah. We hear feet on wood, heavy breath grunts.
clothing rustling and our friend Anne, who is a dancer and aerialist, had this to say. anyone else who dances or does artistic movement of any kind, the scene where she's dancing without any music and all you hear is the smacking and stomping and the panting. Like that is what you hear on stage. That is what I hear in the air. And like it is so rare to actually
see what it feels like to do artistic movement portrayed on screen that well. It got a little over the top at the end, but like I have never seen something that just felt so real to my experience. The other thing about this dance is it's like almost more of like an Alvin Ailey kind of interpretive dance thing, like where it's like there's a lot of pathos going on. She's throwing her body all over. It's very much not.
like a Katy Perry dance routine. It's very not even like a Beyonce routine. It's like, it feels like performance art, which is not the same as like what we saw from that concert footage at the beginning of the movie, which is very staged backup singers, very choreographed in a more traditional sort of pop way. So this is like one of the, just the subtle hint that like she's going through some stuff, maybe this performance, which we never really see, not to spoil it for people, but it's like,
this is going to be a departure for her and she's coming to Sam maybe for a departure. One other thing on sound that I immediately clocked. So when Anne brought this up, there's a there's a parallel in the sound design to when Sam Anselman's using her shears to cut fabric. It's like a really, really crisp cutting. And it's like to me, that was.
27:41
This is like, it's a very metaphorical movie. There's so much allegory, but there are these intense moments of physicality as well. The dance scene is one of those. And every time later on too, when Michaela calls basically, basically sort of steaming fabric into a point that like sort of makes designs and stuff. She's making these crisp lines with her hands. It's all very precise. It's like.
These are not just artists, they're technicians. They're really technically skilled people in addition to being artistically skilled. I thought they nailed the scene. It's one of the most memorable. I thought that it had a great balance of at first we get, I felt left off the hook a little bit because Sam looks concerned at first and then she looks amused and that's kind how I felt. She then blows a raspberry at the end and she's like, how on earth are you going to sing when you do it live? And Mary shoots back.
Practice. So a note from producer Kayla, dancing doesn't come naturally to Anne Hathaway. And it was something that she really had to work at. Not only that, but she sang the songs written by Charlie XCX and Jack Antenoff and FKA Twigs in front of live audience of 400 people. She said the experience was energizing and it was something she knew she'd never do again. So she tried to enjoy every moment. Hathaway studied.
Beyonce's homecoming to prepare herself for the level of work that was required. And she credited Beyonce for having a strong work ethic and admitted that if it was something that she could never keep up with when asked if she'd like to take the songs from Mother Mary on tour. Yeah.
29:18
Okay, at this point we get some backstory reveals finally. Sam admits to her feelings of being betrayed and erased from Mary's success. She didn't tell Sam that Mother Mary didn't need her anymore. She kind of outgrew Sam and was told through whatever we kind of assumed she was told through assistance or some layer of like executive bureaucracy that she's out of a job. We see a flashback to a magazine that has a headline, I wanted to look like Joan of Arc.
And like a lot of black creatives, Sam's work has been fully appropriated, not just by Mary, but by her team of executives and corporate types, corporate producer types. Mary stole the idea, took credit for it in Vanity Fair, some shit. Sam's like, hey, I created these things. That's my story. I would have liked, I would have expected a little bit of credit. And Mary says, I let you make something for me.
And Sam says, no, we did it together. And I'm thinking of all that invisible talent that goes into these supernova performers again, literally thousands of people. So we're about halfway through the movie. I will admit, this is where I started to feel a tiny bit exhausted by all the chess pieces skittering across the board, know? Sam, make me love you again. Mary, I can sing you a song or I can buy you a house. Sam, I could do with a new house. This one's falling apart. Sam reveals that she hasn't engaged.
with any of Mary's work since they had their falling out. This is what you were talking about earlier. She's like, if I hear you on the radio, I turn the dial. On the telly, I turn it off.
30:50
Okay, so this is kind of act two from the movie, Mother Mary. And it's time to learn more about their fight, their what happened in these intervening 10 years from their fight and falling out. Sam describes encountering- The post fallout fallout because there's kind of, yeah. Yeah, Sam describes encountering a ghost made of red fabric. She says that she had a sharp pain in her upper mandible, her wisdom tooth cracked wide open. Again, this was-
This is actually based on something that David Lowery experienced while shooting The Green Knight. And she says, I had to cut you out. She says, I had to cut you out. And she goes full Mansu from No Other Choice. She pulls out some pliers. Yeah. She had another line in there that says, the pain was pure and sharp. And I could think of no other way to describe it other than it was you. Jesus. Again. She's just like destroying, just filleting this poor kid. Holy crap. Okay. So then she's describing the story. There's blood on the sheets.
She says there's a ghost at the foot of her bed. She describes the ghost as red like a feeling. With her goes the pain in my mouth and the knot in my stomach. And the hole in my And the hole in my heart. I that's true. And she also says, where do ghosts go when you don't need them anymore? There you go. It's a very ghost story, kind of, which is, I'm okay with it. Mary hears all this from Sam and it's like, she's not to be outdone. She's like, oh.
I also saw the ghost in Sam Schuetzbeck. You can't even let me have my own ghost story. So Mary describes a disturbing encounter involving a possessed fan. She had a wound in her hand. saw the same- time was in Dublin. Yes. I had a like banshees of Inna Sheeran, which if you know that story, I'm like, they're kind of reenacting some of the same dynamics. they're-
Meeting twigs in Dublin as this this thing is happening. Yeah wrote it feels like a Christmas Carol and I wasn't even thinking Oh, yeah girl ghost. Oh a total it does have some Dickensian vibes to it. she sees the same red ghost or so She says she says she was eventually inhabited by it during a performance Okay. All right. I just I don't have a great segue to this and I just want to get through this part because it's not great Luke gonna try to speed read just because it's
33:06
You we just add it to the craft. just tell D.R. It's bad man. They end up at some dinner party. They're playing Ouija gives not just the craft movie vibes but also like a little hocus pocus. This is a big old giant font rough patch for the movie and FK twigs. Can she act questionable. Sorry. I don't think the material was great. I didn't hate the performance. I just didn't think the.
Materials there she had a line that I wrote down. It was like what is it is someone here? I don't know It was giving a little bit of the weekend trying his hand at acting in the idol Image in is the character's name. It's very bad to focus. It's just me in my notes All right. Yeah, it felt like charmed or Buffy but not like funny and not very campy not campy enough. I guess I've been looking for you. My dearest one. I've come so far. I've traveled across land and sea
I'm just telling you what happens in the movie. don't fully understand it all, but Imogen passes out, which is kind of odd. And then she comes back to her senses and I'm like, something's going on in front of the fireplace. I'm like, what the hell is this? There's some crawling around on the carpet. Are we listening to lyrics from a song? Is she going to write Red Ram on the door? There's some random party girl with a Fuji Fine Pics camera who's taking pictures. I think that's one of Anne Hathaway's entourage.
I know the, it's like an, it's an actress, like I would say like kind of up and coming. It's it's Ky Gerber. Yeah. So Ky Gerber is in weight, like so many more scenes than you realize. She just doesn't have any lines. Which maybe, maybe for a reason. Imogen kisses Mary, Mary cuts her hand with a blade. We hard cut. She's in a black box talking to herself in a bathtub. Sam's toothache is connected to Mary's hand being cut somehow. There's bleeding. There's a red dress. This is, uh,
borderline like subpar, stranger things with the Duffer Brothers when they had this thing they created called The Void, where Eleven was sometimes, if you remember that. It's where she'd hang out when the Duffer Brothers were running out of ideas or ChatGPT was down. Not coincidentally, they were inspired by making The Void, Jonathan Glazer's Under the Skin. It's a note that I took watching this movie. I thought there was some of that movie in here. This is one of the times in the movie where Anne Hathaway's telling the story.
35:31
Mother Mary's telling the story as though it is sort of in a Victorian flat in Dublin, because there's like, you know, there's like the mask wallpaper on the walls. But then you look or the there's sort of a wider shot and you realize it's actually the scene has been built inside of Michaela Coel's dress shop. OK, so like just the top, the top part of the frame, you can see the rough hewn timber from the dress shop. So it's like it's.
That's when I started feeling like this is a movie about storytelling too, the conjuring the visual imagery of when you're telling a ghost story too. This is why we make a great team, Luke, because at this point in the movie, I couldn't look away for the first 15 minutes. I couldn't look at the screen for parts of this because I was cringing fairly thoroughly. It was not great. I found most of I found most of this utterly incoherent.
But I want to see it again, just to make sure I wasn't just being mean, having a moment. We get a naked Mary crawling out of this tub. We get an overhead light swinging. Feels like, like John Carpenter, maybe a little nightmare in Elm Street. It's just, I asked myself, can the third act rescue this? First act, pretty solid. Second act, eugh. Then we get another song and I'm like, sweet goddamn relief. We need another song. We get one and we find out that it's the night that she does something crazy. We get a little flashback. It's a...
Somehow, guess we're, I'm just speculating, but it's like, maybe the celebrity got to her. Something went awry. She falls. She's in it's like she goes into a fugue state. Yeah. She's in a performance and she's on a big platform that rises above the thing. If you've ever been to one of these things, Beyonce, Very, yeah. That take McCray concert I went to, I was like, wow. She was in some places are like that harnesses, It's really interesting.
And she just decides and it looks like she's doing it on purpose. Maybe she tripped, but maybe she did intentionally. I read it as intentional. She falls backward, gets hurt. And I'm like, this is getting interesting. thing that I noted, though, when she as she's falling off, it kind of goes to slow motion, which is another thing. Larry does a lot. Her body sort of mimicked the ghost to me in that moment. yeah. I know about that. So it's he's playing like I don't think act two really worked very well either. But it's clear he's trying to sort of like.
37:49
play with what is this ghost? it an actual like phantom? Is it a representation of the two of them and their relationship troubles? That's where I ultimately landed. But there are these moments where the ghost looks like Michaela Coel to me at different points and it looked like Anne Hathaway. And then when Anne Hathaway falls, the way she was suspended reminded me of the way the puppet was draped. Interesting. So her safety cord catches her. Yeah. But it still like breaks her. Tell me what this means. She has a massive scar.
Correct.
38:22
Well, that's the end of act two. Act three starts with Sam leading Mary through a ritual. Why? Because it's time to force her to physically confront the little red silk gremlin. Sam says, let's stop. Let's cast her out. Sam draws a circle on the floor and chalk with a candle in the middle and sort of an ad hoc pagan ritual begins. We hear some lines like this spirit, this woman in red.
is who you wrote your song about. Let's make the dress about her too. I, all caps, I'm trying so hard. There's lots of deep breaths. There's some ping ponging shots from Mary back to Sam. Mary says, Sam, you forgot something. She needs a way out. And she pricks her finger with the needle. They become blood sisters. They go from needle to scissors. And Mary says, we need a key to open the door. And she cuts a wound in her chest.
Sam reaches into Mary's chest and the wound looks vaginal. She pulls out the red dress and I'm like, what the cornball hell is happening here? Did Lowry get caught in a painful rewrite with three weeks left to go before production? Now it could be a classic Lowry thing where he just changed his mind and it became more elaborate or whatever. It started with a simple idea. I want to do a concert movie, but I don't have, I'm who, would I do that for or with or whatever.
The ribbon of the red dress comes pouring out of her chest wound and it hovers like a screensaver in the air. Okay. It's looking a little, we'll call it Windows XP. Yeah. Okay. They look up at it with reverence and it's the red dress. So this is why we brought an incredible audience because we got some really cool feedback from people like our friends, Anne and Erin. Except at the same time, it's really interesting that the crux of the
Action is the wrong word. How the ghost gets introduced is through a pagan ritual. And so the contrast between, I'm essentially using Catholicism, Christianity as a marketing tool, except that one pagan ritual is the thing that actually changes things. That is a really interesting idea. The interplay of pagan and Christian
40:47
symbology is all throughout the Green Knight too. Like it's everywhere. The last dress, was so, I'm still thinking about the hard versus the soft in that dress, the way that like they pressed all of these crisp, sharp, jagged almost edges in like this clarity idea that she's talking about. And then it's twisted into something that has so much texture and life. And in some places where the folds are so close, it looks like velvet almost.
And it's just like the contours of this final dress and the way that the textures, like everything across the spectrum exists in this one dress. feels like it's like telling the story of their whole relationship and like everything between them. So the whole thing with the red gremlin that lives inside of Mary, the one that comes out of... Well, one that comes out of Sam's... You're right. It starts... out of Sam's tooth and then goes to live...
It takes four years to go from wherever Sam lives in England to wherever Mother Mary ends up playing in Dublin. That's a pretty slow ghost. Four years to go probably, 500 miles across the Irish Sea? Yeah. So as they're standing there and the red dress gremlin thing is hovering above them, her team barges in and it's led by Sean Clifford, AKA Claire, the sister from Fleabag.
Yep. And she shouts, Jesus fucking Christ. And I'm like, yeah, totally. Well, because Mother Mary has a chest wound now. Yeah. Yeah. And then we hear helicopters overhead. Don't worry. The end of the movie is near. These helicopters are there to collect this kind of Lady Gaga-esque figure of Mother Mary. says, and I think all is, it's kind of like everything's repaired at that point. Sam says, get some rest when you wake up. I just might have something to show you. And Mary says,
you will and it'll be perfect. It's very neat. Mary goes to perform one last time in the movie. But she's not in the dress. She's not in the dress. It's the big moment. She sheds her old identity on stage. She dedicates the performance to Sam, rips off her dress, shows her scars. She's very exposed, closes her eyes. And then Sam can just imagine the dress, but we never see it on Mary. Yep. Yeah. It's hovering over Sam. It's like,
43:09
bleeding out of her chest into this projected image, but we don't ever get to actually see it. Very on the nose stuff here. Hey Sam, yes. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Finally, Mary issues the Holy Trinity of apologies to Sam and that's the end of the movie.
That's how the movie started. We didn't say that at the beginning of the movie, but she said something about, need you to say you're sorry three times. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah. And she finally does. I didn't even write it down when she said that line. Cause I was like, that's kind of weird. Yeah. But no, she quite literally just says, yeah, it's a Trinity thing. Must be a biblical thing. there are other moments where the Trinity comes up. There's the, there's a scene where it's like meant to symbolize, I think mother Mary getting up and then down off of stage, the grueling.
you know, the grueling aspects of going on tour. That to me felt very much like the crucifixion scene, because what David Lowery does is he shows her entirely backlit with some crazy like red and white imagery behind her. All you see is silhouette. You see a silhouette of her. You see a silhouette of what, you know, as somebody who's been around like backstage and stuff, it's like it is the it's the risers. It's the steps going up.
stage. Sure. She goes up. She she goes up kind of like girl boss style. But then rather than sort of showing the entire width of the stage, Lowry like compresses it so it feels like a hill. And for those who spent, you know, 20 years of their life looking at like illustrated Christian iconography and stuff, it feels like the three crosses where Jesus gets crucified because she goes up.
once comes back down and then the second time she goes up, it's a little bit of a harder slog. And then by the end, she's literally being carried up the stairs and back down. to me, that's like, that is her crucifixion, but it's also the sim, it's more sort of directly like she's just so fatigued from this life. It's burning her out. Let's take a quick break and then we're going to share some final feedback from our audience.
45:11
Okay, so I'm in the same boat as Benji. An atheist. weird that I'm raising my hand. Did go to Catholic school. I feel like as an artist, I'm not religious, but the feeling of something bigger than you, the feeling that there's like something that wants to be let in that you have to hold and then let out. And that as a religious experience, as like this fundamental creativity.
You can't do that by yourself in most cases, like this shared fundamental spirit of creativity and art and love and hate that's like wrestling with both of them and living in both of them. That I resonated with in a religious way, in a weird, like it felt like a religious experience watching it, even though I'm not religious. Well, filmmaking and certainly whatever goes into a production of like a concert,
is a communal art form and that commune is fucking enormous, right? So I really did like that read of what was part of the DNA of this movie. That information that Aaron is talking about is in the text of this movie. Absolutely. No, it's, you know, I haven't read anything about like his sort of approach to spirituality or whatever, but like, this is the thing, like paganism in addition to being sort of polytheistic and whatever else is like, it's very much about sort of
oneness with creation. The Green Knight is literally an allegory. The original God in the Green Knight is an allegory about basically the shift from paganism to Christianity in England as one of the thematic elements. it feels like Lowry is playing with that in both of these two movies in different ways where it's like, where does the divine live? Does it live?
out there, does it live within us? Does it live in the sort of the deep feeling, but kind of at an intellectual level, unknowable connection between people? Like, let's listen to what Skye says about the feeling of the red entity and holding onto something. really liked this too. I thought that it was really cool that as an audience member, I almost felt the weight of that red entity come into myself as well and start to pick apart.
47:26
where I have that cloth or where I'm holding that cloth and as it was taken out of her, I almost felt like it was taken out of me too. Like I had this release of something and I was sitting here like, what the heck is going on? Like I'm not holding anything, but I think it's a testament to what all of us are holding, love or hate. So this to me, like this is where I think I forgive the film, its flaws because what I felt, what I think Sky is.
describing there is catharsis. catharsis is not a thing you can intellectualize. I've never intellectualized my way to catharsis. I've been just broken up about plenty of things. I've been anxious about plenty of things. I've been brokenhearted about plenty of things. And I've never been able to reason my way to catharsis. It just comes upon me. And that feels like a spiritual experience to me. I also really want to talk about rupture and repair, which we will.
Because there's one way you can read this movie that I think could be a bit controversial for lack of a better description. But I'm going to come back to that after we read this little couple more pieces of feedback here from this is Mike on the red dress never being revealed, which is part of this potential read you can have over the movie. I thought it was a really interesting choice that we never got to see the red dress on in the in the end, being that surreal moment.
Was she really there or is that just her imagination? Along those lines, this is our final piece of feedback from audience from Sky speculating about what Mike is introducing, which is like, is Mother Mary a ghost possibly? I'm going to be so honest. We got to that end part where she's floating and it was attached to the other actress's heart. Yeah. And my first question was, did she die? Did she was she actually?
dead for this whole creation and this whole letting go. And the retelling of the story was before the fall or after the fall or whatever, but was that actually the director giving us a hint that she never was there? So I read that a different way. It's interesting because that's a totally, I think that's a totally legitimate read because when you see when the ghost is kind of coming out of Michaela Coel's character again at the end, Hathaway is actually, Anne Hathaway has kind of become the ghost.
49:46
Did you buy this idea that her character might be dead or is a ghost or whatever? I wasn't going that literal with it because it felt to me, again, it's like, this has felt to me like these are two deeply creative people. They're artists. They had this bond that was very, very personal at the beginning. And then it partially got torn apart by fame and by the world intruding on their relationship. was almost, it felt to me like, know, when
You like go through a breakup or you go through a tough period and you fall out of love with something and then only later with like time and distance. The relationship has changed fundamentally, but you you are you at least love the memory of it or you love the feeling you had or you you're able to sort of find is a different form of love, but it's a it's still love nonetheless. That's kind of what it read like to me, which is why I think I like this movie so much because it felt.
for all the holes that you're absolutely right about. Like, Lowry just couldn't figure out how to get the ghosts to connect to each other without two seances. he had a really awesome idea about something deeply metaphorical and surreal in parts and impressionistic in other parts. It's just, it's- And ideas of like a rupture between a creative partnership.
which is a gorgeous thing to explore. And then he's like, well, shit, how the hell do I make this middle piece go together? like, I guess it's gotta be two seances. Yeah, it's gotta be two. Like the producers are calling, he's like, we need the second one. I'm going back into the fucking green night. I'm looking at footage from a ghost story. I think I can make this work. I'll just grab Rooney Mara eating a pie and ghost story. I'll stitch that into this and then we'll have our ending that we need, because I need that second seance. So it's really interesting. This is what happened subsequent to us watching this movie.
transpired yesterday, you were, think, liminally aware of what was happening, because I asked you about Aaron. If the math is there, this is part of Lowry with leaving enough information for people to do what they want with it, you can read this as being a queer love story. Absolutely. So Wikipedia put that they're former lovers, and that's why I was like, what the fuck? I texted that to Anne and to Aaron. I was like, wait a minute, am I an idiot?
51:59
Is this, were they lovers? They were like, I didn't read it. I think you can read it that way, but it was definitely not explicitly stated. I assumed they were lovers. I did not. I thought they were friends and they had a really close bond dating back to when they were teenagers. I read it a story of blackness for the Michaela Coel character and white people appropriating black talent. I read it as a friendship. read it all those things. I didn't read the lover angle. So when Wikipedia put that in there, though, I thought, whoa, so a lot of people did that.
But then the other part is if you read the characters, if anybody's dead or a ghost, then you fall into, and this is what I chatted with Aaron and Anne about yesterday, is like, there's this trope called the bury your gaze or dead lesbian syndrome. yeah. Which is this idea of TLDR of like the far too common trope where like across all media, including video games like The Last of Us,
Gay or lesbian characters tend to meet very unhappy endings. Death, suicide, heartbreak, insanity, imprisonment, you name it. They can't have possibly a happy ending. Well, that's why I loved chatting with Aaron and Anne about that topic. Cause I was like, well, the read is there if you think they're lovers and do you think somebody died at the end? Well, I don't, I, it's not like I choose. I didn't think the information pointed that way. I think it's not a quite antithetical reading of the movie, but to me it was a story about
Even if they were lovers, it's a story about the rupture and the repair of that relationship. I think, yeah. And, you know, I it does have a happy ending to me. One final Trinity we should talk about, like I think my ultimate takeaway, whether they were actual lovers or just, whether it was Eros or Agape, Agape to kind of use the. That's all Greek to me. It is literally Greek. Whether, you know, whether it was like sort of filial love or romantic love.
It was like one of them was the father. One of them was the son. And then this creative partnership they had, which I felt was symbolized by the ghost symbolized by the red dress at the end was like the Holy Spirit. And the Holy Spirit was that intangible thing that friend that is like exists between friends or between creative partners or between just anybody who has a connection with another person. And ultimately, again, like I'm going to, you know, if you've got to sit through that tough second act to
54:19
walk away feeling like that, then I'm okay with that, actually.
54:25
My theory about David Lowery's movies coming in here was the ones I've seen is that they're all ghost stories to some degree. Ain't them body saints. Came out in 2013, a Bonnie and Clyde story where Clyde takes the fall for the crimes of Bonnie and Clyde. goes to prison. He escapes from prison to reunite with his wife and child. His wife is played by Rooney Mara. And it's something that he had promised he would do. So when he comes back to town and he looks and behaves like a ghost of a man,
chasing a version of a life that no longer exists and has to live with the consequences of that. A ghost story kind of speaks for itself, right? A man dies and returns as a literal ghost. It's not a spoiler, it's in the long line. He watches time pass in the house that he once lived in. That movie fucked me up completely and thoroughly. Loved a ghost story. As somebody who has been so completely bewitched by my own house at times when my family's not home.
So that's a movie about a guy who's just so stuck in his fucking house. He loves his house. Well, that's the nature of ghosts, right? They exist between life and the afterlife. Yeah, life and purgatory kind of thing. 30 page script started with an idea of wanting to capture the character of a ghost of a dude covered in a bed sheet with the eyes cut out. This is one of the like David Lowery being like a film student moments that I fucking love.
almost five minute scene of Rooney Mara eating a pie that was baked by one of her neighbors while she's grieving the death of her partner. And he films the whole fucking thing. The profile shot, she slinks to the floor of her kitchen of her now empty house, feeling that thing I'm describing, the trace, the whatever. That's exactly what I meant earlier when I said that Lowry does that thing you want to see, that you see in student films, but don't usually see in anything approaching an industry film. He's a man that becomes a ghost and is stuck in a past that he literally cannot move on from.
Old man in the gun, same thing. 80 year old bank robber that might as well be the Affleck character from Ain't Them Body Saints, which I talked about. His daughter from when he was much younger in the story helps turn him into the cops. This is like one of those, his legacy coming back to get him. Green Knight in 2021, Sir Gawain accepts a challenge from the Green Knight and his entire life's journey is shaped by that one decision. His future is haunted by a promise that he can't take back. That is straight out of Ain't Them Body Saints. So I think all of David Lowery's movies
56:42
are effectively ghost stories, the ones that I've seen. I can't tell you how much I appreciate this dude. I'm glad he exists. I'm glad he's making movies. Ghost story, yes. Also, you mentioned it earlier, and I think it's right, fairy tale, right? Gawain is like a prototypical fairy tale. Aaron and Am both brought up Portrait of a Lady on Fire, course. Shama's 2019 masterpiece about two women stuck in a house on an island. One's an aristocrat, the other is a painter.
commissioned to paint her portrait. Erin, the Erin with an A recommended a film by British filmmaker Peter Strickland called In Fabric, which is a movie about a haunted red dress that travels from owner to owner tormenting whoever wears it. It was brought to the US by A24 in 2019. I thought of two movies.
The two sleuths, there was one that was made in 1972 with Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine. And then another was made in 2007 with Michael Caine and Jude Law, where now Michael Caine is playing the Olivier part. People hated the new one. It was directed by Ken Brana and it was a screenplay by Harold Pinter before he died. I kind of liked it though. It got shit on by critics. I saw it and liked it. didn't really make an impression on me though. But a very talky chamber drama with lots of psychological chest.
All right, Luke, that's all I have on Mother Mary. again, despite the second act stumble, I'm still thinking about it. Well, I think I'm gonna buy it. So I know that sounds weird given some of the things I said about it, but there's like a, there's 30 or 40 minutes of this movie that are quite exquisite. So I want to have the 4K from H24. That's gonna do it for this episode of all those moments. We hoped you enjoyed your time with us. If you did hit that subscribe button.
Give us a review, share the good word of the show with your friends. Our next episode will be all about Cole Webley's movie Omaha starring John Magaro. I spent 90 minutes chatting with Webley. I can't wait to share what he had to say about his debut feature film. After that, it's gonna be all in on In the Gray from Guy Ritchie. So buckle up for that one, Luke.
58:50
Thank you again to Anne, Sky, Aaron with an E, Aaron with an A, and Mike. Thank you to the Magic Lantern. Thank you to everyone for watching or listening. And thank you, Luke. It's coming. It's coming. It's here. Thanks, Benji. This black suit fits like a glove. I was born to be the widow of love.
59:16
in time