Courtesy of A24
Audio By Carbonatix
Keep Dallas Observer Free
We’re aiming to raise $10,000 by April 26. Your support ensures Dallas Observer can continue watching out for you and our community. No paywall. Always accessible. Daily online and weekly in print.
You can always feel the dirt beneath your fingernails when you watch a David Lowery film. The Dallas filmmaker has a distinctly earthy feel to his works, where you can almost breathe in the dust of history settling over his stories. Yet, at the exact same time, his narratives feel like they are floating through the cosmos, charting paths toward truths we never knew existed.
His latest cinematic venture, Mother Mary, is no different. Starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, the film operates as a ghost story of sorts. However, it is not the kind that relies on cheap scares or creaking floorboards. Instead, it is an intoxicating, hallucinatory night of confrontation, memory and reinvention that dissects the haunting nature of a fractured friendship. It is a film with a lot on its mind, finding beautiful, intense ways to explore unresolved pain while also opening up the sensation of discovering a new dimension in life.
And for Lowery, the journey of making it always leads back home to Texas.
The Dallas DNA of a Global Story
Before he was directing major Hollywood features, Lowery was absorbing the cinematic potential of his own backyard. The seeds were planted early on, watching heavy hitters roll through town.
“Oliver Stone making Born on the Fourth of July hinted that Dallas was a place where big movies could get made,” Lowery says to the Observer, recalling his early realizations about his hometown.
That foundational connection has never wavered. Even when a production takes him across the globe, the gravitational pull of North Texas brings him back.
“Dallas is the place I learned how to make movies,” he notes. “When I am not able to make movies in Dallas, I still finish them here.”
True to his word, the post-production for Mother Mary ran straight through the city. The sound mix, handled by Johnny Marshall, was even completed right inside Lowery’s Dallas home. For a film so meticulously crafted around auditory experiences and the rhythm of spoken words, grounding that technical work in a familiar, intimate space makes perfect sense.
A Symphony of Spoken Word
Mother Mary follows iconic pop star Mother Mary (Hathaway) as she reunites with her estranged best friend and former costume designer, Sam Anselm (Coel), on the eve of a massive comeback performance. Mary needs one final dress, but the request unearths a decade of buried wounds.
If Lowery’s previous A24 film, The Green Knight, proved his ability to weave classic literature into visual splendor, Mother Mary proves he can do the same with modern dialogue. The film rejects the standard, matter-of-fact talkathon you might expect from a reunion drama. Instead, it demands a beat or two to absorb its immense power.
“This movie was going to live and die by its dialogue and the delivery of that dialogue,” Lowery explains. “I wanted to make a movie that was restricted to language, where language was front and center.”
The script delivers a poetic ferocity that Hathaway and Coel chew on with absolute brilliance. When Sam confronts Mary, the words are sharp enough to draw blood.
“You are a carcinogen,” Sam tells her at one point. “I would say that you are a tumor whose malignancy has defined the ebb and flow of all I’ve done, of all I have tried to do.”
Lowery matches this musical, rhythmic language with the film’s editing and sound design. Background noises — sometimes animalistic, sometimes spooky and ethereal — inform the characters’ inner workings. Yet, Lowery remains fiercely protective of the visual narrative.
“Turning the sound off is the best way to ensure the visual language of the movie contributes to the storytelling,” he says.
At a certain point, the movie simply has to function as a movie.
Stitching Together the Pieces
At its core, Mother Mary explores two artists’ pursuit of creative salvation during their darkest hours. It looks at people whose bond is so profound that neither science nor simple apologies can explain or repair it. The film is not afraid to venture into difficult territory, visually articulating its ghostly aspects to show how pieces of a broken friendship can poison a person’s potential. Mary is an artist who constantly stitches herself together to present her art to the world, only to come entirely undone once the curtain falls.
“I want profundity, authenticity, clarity,” Mary pleads in the film. “Peeling away, old skin, barnacles, dead hair. I want to be sharp. I want to have a point.”
To bring this larger-than-life pop persona into reality, Lowery enlisted musical heavyweights Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff to pen original songs, alongside FKA Twigs (who plays Imogen, a figure guiding Mary through a transformative spiritual journey). The music feels authentic, like tracks currently dominating the upper echelons of the pop charts, anchoring the film’s hallucinatory elements in a very real, tangible music industry.
The costumes, brought to life by designer Bina Daigeler, serve as a visual extension of the film’s emotional weight.
“Every one of those dresses is incredibly personal to her,” Lowery says of Daigeler’s work, which acts as armor, memory, and ultimately, a catalyst for the film’s climax.
Making the Hometown Proud
Mother Mary is a triumph of mood, music and dialogue. It is a story about how art can take something terrible and turn it into something beautiful.
For Dallas readers and film lovers, it is a thrilling reminder of the caliber of storyteller that calls this city home. Lowery has once again managed to capture the vast, cosmic expanse of human emotion and ground it in the earthy, visceral reality of two people simply talking to one another in a room.
It is an artfully constructed film that challenges its audience to listen closely, to feel deeply and to confront the ghosts of their own pasts. And it is a film that should make Dallas incredibly proud to claim David Lowery as one of its own.
Mother Mary opens in limited release on April 17 and in Dallas theaters on April 24.
