'Mother Mary' turns Anne Hathaway into a haunted pop icon, with Taylor Swift and Rosalía in its DNA

A pop star at a crossroads

David Lowery conceived 'Mother Mary' as he turned 40, a meditation on midlife creativity transposed onto a global pop icon. Anne Hathaway plays the title character, a singer recovering from a serious accident during her last tour. Days before a high-stakes comeback, none of her stage outfits feel right. She arrives unannounced at the remote farm-studio of Sam (Michaela Coel), the designer who once built her image and whose partnership ended in bitterness. The commission (a single transformative dress) reopens wounds that soon take physical form as a ghost made of red fabric.

“Una relación creativa es tan íntima como cualquier matrimonio. Es tan apasionada como una gran historia de amor y está igual de llena de tensiones y conflictos.”

Building a believable idol

Lowery did not want a parody. He hired Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX and FKA Twigs to write the songs, and Hathaway spent five months in a training camp to move and sing like someone who could command a stadium. The director told El Periódico he wanted Hathaway's presence to feel "lo más icónica posible", capable of generating the kind of quasi-religious devotion he associates with 100,000-strong Taylor Swift concerts. Iris van Herpen designed the climactic dress, a sculptural piece that had to work both on stage and as narrative catharsis.

“Quise que su presencia en esas secuencias fuera lo más icónica posible. Quería que irradiara una energía capaz de generar en el público una fascinación extrema, el tipo de experiencia religiosa que sienten las 100,000 personas que asisten a un concierto de Taylor Swift.”

Swift, Beyoncé, Rosalía and the Catholic imagination

Lowery has been explicit that the character draws on Taylor Swift, particularly the baroque staging of the 2018 Reputation tour. But he also cites Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and Madonna, and multiple Spanish critics note that Hathaway's iconography (corsets, aureoles, confessional postures) echoes Rosalía's recent Motomami-era Catholic visuals. Lowery told eldiario.es that he ultimately wrote Mother Mary as a version of himself: "quise que Mother Mary fuera como yo, si yo fuera una estrella de pop ahora mismo." Raised Catholic with parents who despised Madonna, he grew up convinced pop could be as sacred and ecstatic as religion.

“Cuando empecé a escribir esta película tenía casi 40 años y hoy tengo 45. Quise reflexionar sobre mi proceso creativo, y desplacé todos esos mecanismos a una estrella del pop.”

A single-room ghost story

Almost the entire film unfolds inside Sam's farm-studio, a dark-wooded, theatrical space from which memory opens trapdoors into arenas and hotel rooms. Reviewers draw a direct line to Lowery's 'A Ghost Story' (2017), where a bedsheet with eyeholes carried immense grief; here the spectre is crimson silk, materialising the wounds of a broken creative partnership. The cast also includes Hunter Schafer, Alba Baptista and Isaura Barbé-Brown, with FKA Twigs in a small acting role.

Critical reception: bold, divisive, occasionally maudlin

Spanish outlets are split. El Confidencial calls it "una de las películas más singulares del año" and praises Michaela Coel's magnetic performance, while noting the screenplay grows redundant. EL PAÍS is harsher, arguing that Lowery's metaphors for grief and trauma feel "demasiado pretenciosos y superficiales" and that the film never reaches the darkness of Brady Corbet's 'Vox Lux' or Carlos Vermut's 'Quién te cantará'. RTVE acknowledges the risky formal proposal but finds its greatest strength in the two leads. The film arrives in Spanish cinemas on a wave of Hathaway momentum after 'El diablo viste de Prada 2' and 'La Odisea', with 'Verity' and 'The End of Oak Street' still to come in 2026.

From three names to one

Lowery told La Vanguardia his shortlist for the lead contained three names, but "solo había un nombre y era el de Anne Hathaway." The same report notes that production required the crew to study the Taylor Swift documentary 'Miss Americana' and that Hathaway worked on the original songs until they felt like her own. For the director, the dress and the film itself became a single object: a representation of the catharsis both characters must undergo.