In Mother Mary, Anne Hathaway explores and dissects what it’s like to be a modern, female pop star. In the process, she delivers a performance that’s an excavation of fame, femininity and the strange, glittering violence required to remain visible in a world that consumes women as sex objects and spectacle.
At 43, Hathaway finds herself in a career chapter that’s half reinvention and half refinement. There is a precision now — an emotional calibration — that feels worlds away from the ingénue of The Princess Diaries or even the scrappy assistant of The Devil Wears Prada. In Mother Mary, those earlier selves echo faintly, refracted through the fractured psyche of a woman who’s lived most of her life under the gaze.
Directed by David Lowery, the film follows Mary, a global pop icon clawing her way towards a comeback, who reconnects with her former collaborator and possible lover, Sam (Michaela Coel). Their reunion — sparked by something as deceptively simple as a dress — unspools into a fever dream of memory, desire and artistic co-dependency.
Becoming Mary: pop as performance, performance as survival
Hathaway has often been drawn towards musical roles — her Oscar-winning turn in Les Misérables is a career high — but Mother Mary demands something more elusive. It’s not musical theatre; it’s pop, that manufactured but emotionally immediate of art forms.
To prepare, Hathaway immersed herself in the mechanics of modern superstardom. She studied Beyoncé like an anthropologist, spending two years shaping Mary’s voice and physical characteristics. What struck her was the vocal control, but also the restraint — a “stillness” that allows emotion to resonate.
Hathaway’s admission that she doesn’t consider herself a “natural singer” is telling, suggesting that her performance is filled with vulnerability. Her portrayal of Mary isn’t effortless; she’s constructed, disciplined, perpetually on the brink of collapse. In one particularly gruelling scene, the emotional toll became overwhelming — Hathaway reportedly warned her co-star: “I think what’s going to come out of me will hurt you.”
There’s a paradox at the heart of Mother Mary: the idea that pop — often dismissed as surface — is actually an act of profound emotional exposure.
Fashion as language
If music is Mary’s voice, fashion is her armour.
Costume designer Bina Daigeler constructs a wardrobe that intensely charts Mary’s psychological arc. Crystal-studded bodysuits, halo-like headpieces and sheer, sculptural gowns draw on the iconography of Madonna, Taylor Swift, and Dua Lipa, while pushing into something stranger and more symbolic.
In the film’s climax, Mary appears in a dramatic red organza creation by Iris van Herpen — a look that evokes both martyrdom and rebirth.
Off-screen, Hathaway enthusiastically embraced the aesthetic. During the film’s promotional tour, she leaned into sheer fabrics, sculptural silhouettes and unapologetic sensuality — channelling everything from Lady Gaga to Swift’s Reputation era.
It is a blurring of lines: the actress becomes the character becomes the icon.
The chemistry of collapse
Central to the film’s emotional core is Hathaway’s dynamic with Coel — a relationship that isn’t easy to categorise. It’s creative, romantic, antagonistic; at times, it feels almost mythic.
Coel described their connection as something deeper than conventional love, “greater than a love I’ve ever known with a stranger”. That intensity translates on screen into a push-pull dynamic bordering on possession. Each woman reflects and distorts the other, like mirrors angled slightly off.
Lowery’s direction leans into this ambiguity, framing their relationship through surreal imagery and gothic flourishes. Critics described the film as a “visually arresting” pop melodrama, even if its narrative occasionally dissolves into abstraction.
But perhaps coherence doesn’t matter so much, and Mother Mary is less interested in telling a story than in evoking a state of being — the disorientation of fame, the intimacy of collaboration, the terror of being seen metaphorically naked.
The sound of reinvention
The film’s soundtrack — featuring contributions from Charli XCX, FKA twigs and Jack Antonoff — is integral to its atmosphere.
They’re not traditional musical numbers but function more like emotional ruptures, moments where language fails and music takes over. Each track is curated to reflect Mary’s interiority — longing, rage, and hunger for transcendence.
Hathaway reportedly worked closely with the artists to understand how a pop star sounds, but also how she thinks: the rhythms of touring, the pressures of reinvention, the constant negotiation between authenticity and performance.
A brief return to the runway
It’s impossible to discuss Hathaway in 2026 without acknowledging the cultural gravity of The Devil Wears Prada 2, in which she reprises her role as Andy Sachs — now navigating a dramatically altered media landscape.
If Mother Mary is about the cost of visibility, Prada 2 explores its evolution. Andy, once the wide-eyed outsider, returns as a seasoned insider, her ambition tempered by experience. Hathaway has spoken about entering a new phase of life, defined by “harmony” more than “balance”.
It’s a subtle but significant shift. Mary is all intensity and fragmentation, and Andy promises something steadier and more grounded. Together, the roles form a diptych: two women negotiating identity within systems that demand transformation.
The Hathaway moment
There’s a temptation, when writing about Hathaway, to frame her current success as a comeback. It’s something more deliberate: a recalibration.
In Mother Mary, she strips away the charm that has defined her screen persona, replacing it with something sharper, stranger and more unsettling. It’s one of the boldest choices of her career.
But beneath the spectacle — the couture, the music, the psychological intensity — there remains a recognisable core. Hathaway has always been an actress drawn to emotional truth, even when wrapped in fantasy.
Mary may be a pop icon, but she is also something more universal: a woman trying, against the odds, to reconcile who she is with who the world wants her to be. And so the film feels less like a departure than a culmination.
A star isn’t born, she’s made — and remade again, until what remains is something indelible.
Mother Mary is on circuit now.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.