David Lowery’s Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway as a pop star and Michaela Coel as her (former) costume designer, examines what it means to become a “mother” and to live inside a role that has already been defined for you.
Like most chronically online people, I’ve come across phrases like “she’s so mother” and “mother is mothering” more times than I can count. So when I saw the title Mother Mary, my mind went there first—not to religion, but to that specific kind of pop-cultural elevation. In queer internet language, “mother” isn’t just a compliment. It’s a way of turning a woman into something larger than herself: part icon, part shared fantasy.
David Lowery’s Mother Mary, starring Anne Hathaway as a pop star and Michaela Coel as her (former) costume designer, feels acutely aware of that transformation. It examines what it means to become a “mother” and to live inside a role that has already been defined for you.
While the term now circulates freely in fandom spaces, its queer usage comes from the 1960s New York ballroom scene, where Black and Latinx drag performers formed houses and took in LGBTQ+ youth who had been rejected by their families. “Mother” was literal there: a role of care and mentorship. Today, the term has been flattened into online shorthand for admiration. But “mother” is less a name than a role that comes with expectation and projection already built in.
Mother Mary leans into that tension. Its central figure is less a person than a persona, someone constantly being shaped and held in place by others. It collapses the line between admiration and projection, and Hathaway’s performance sits right in that gap—a woman trying to reconcile who she is with the version of herself that everyone else seems to recognise.
In her comeback performance, Mother Mary tries to reach for something more honest underneath the glamour. She turns to Coel’s Sam, the costume designer she once worked closely with, and perhaps the only person she believes has ever really seen her. Their relationship is fractured: Sam feels discarded after devoting herself to Mother Mary’s image, while Mother Mary feels reduced to a vessel for Sam’s vision.
When the audience, the media, and the industry all partake in sculpting the image of a “mother,” how much of one’s true self is left?
We never learn Mother Mary’s real name. She assumes the role of a pop star, which slowly overtakes her and becomes an identity she has to sustain. There’s a specifically queer tension here: not simply hiding who you are, but becoming fluent in performing a version of yourself even when it isn’t fully yours. Sam urges her to stop performing if she doesn’t enjoy it, as if stepping out of the role were a real option. Mother Mary refuses. It’s the only version of herself she knows how to be.
To be “mother” is to carry expectations and be constantly watched. The film externalises that pressure through the ghost that moves between Mother Mary and Sam as a shared weight. It attaches itself to Mother Mary, whom she feels responsible for containing, even as it consumes and traps her.
The absence of men doesn’t undo that structure. If anything, it creates a closed system where identity is sustained collectively. The people around Mother Mary help build her, but that care gradually becomes something closer to control.
She needs to wear the halo that digs into her head because it’s what makes her legible as “mother.” Without it, she risks becoming unrecognisable.
That’s what Mother Mary ultimately circles: the cost of being seen in the first place. Becoming “mother” is a form of power, but also a kind of disappearance. “Mothers” are seen and revered, yet the role leaves little room for anything that doesn’t fit inside it. In the end, what Mother Mary questions is whether there is any way back from that, or whether becoming “mother” means giving up the possibility of being anything else.
Mother Mary is now available to stream, rent or buy.
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