Pop Stardom Meets Pentecost in Mother Mary

In David Lowery’s Mother Mary, the pop world of Mary (Anne Hathaway) collides with the haunted private realm of her former dress designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel). Through halos, Joan of Arc armor, séances, and an exorcism that refuses certainty, the film tu

When Mary walks back into Sam Anselm’s studio, the distance between their worlds has already been staged for years. Mary—Anne Hathaway as a pop icon—moves through arenas that blur into one another. her geography losing distinct edges under stadium lights and adoring fans. Sam’s world, by contrast, retreats into dust and an English estate that feels anachronistic. After a partnership defined by craft and closeness, Mary turned away from her designer. Sam took it as betrayal, cut her world off, and—she says—entered her “Miss Havisham period.”.

Then Mary shows up anyway, demanding an Anselm dress for her next show.

Lowery’s Mother Mary. currently in theaters. is built on collision: fame against memory. modern audiences against older rituals. and a pop-machine atmosphere against the possibility that the spiritual realm can still break through. The film doesn’t treat transcendence like a solved problem. It treats it like something that keeps returning, even when modern life insists it shouldn’t.

Mary’s comeback is tied to the aftermath of a tragic mid-show accident—“possibly no accident,” the story suggests. Mary wasn’t feeling like herself long before the accident. She needs Sam to create a dress that “feels like her,” and Sam agrees, but not gently. As Sam reopens wounds. bitterness circulates between them. and the relationship’s buried “ghosts” start to surface—not with a clean reveal. but with a steady pressure that keeps building.

The question isn’t whether the supernatural exists on this movie’s terms. The question is what form it takes when the world that used to recognize spirits now calls them superstition. Sam comes closest to naming that pressure when she declares that they are to “await the day of our Pentecost.” It’s an unexpected word for a film steeped in stagecraft and celebrity spectacle. yet Lowery plants it like a key inside the language of design. Pentecost arrives in the film with the touch of a fiery tongue, but what descends is left stubbornly unresolved.

On stage. Mary is crowned with halo-like headpieces—custom-made. glittering at moments. and at other times evoking martyrdom with rusty nails. Sam’s favorite dress casts Mary as Joan of Arc, complete with armored decoration. The designer also draws on the memory of her first communion. speaking to the reverential power Mother Mary casts over her devoted acolytes. When religious subtext thickens this way, the story turns naturally toward séances and exorcisms.

And still, the film won’t give viewers the tidy relief of a final answer. The ambiguity is part of its engine.

That refusal lands like an argument about the present moment. Philosopher Charles Taylor. in A Secular Age. traces how Western life shifted “from a society in which it was virtually impossible not to believe in God. to one in which faith. even for the staunchest believer. is one human possibility among others.” Taylor’s point isn’t just about religion shrinking in public life. It’s about the “conditions of belief” changing—about the gradual disenchantment of the world. where mystery and inexplicable powers no longer feel like the default atmosphere. Under those conditions, faith in God or any divinity becomes one option among many.

But Mother Mary insists that the impulse for transcendence doesn’t vanish. It only loses its map. Taylor writes that modern people search “within. or beyond… which could compensate for the meaning lost with transcendence.” Journalist Tara Isabella Burton takes that desire and frames it through “remix culture. ” describing how institutionalized religion’s longings—“a sense of meaning in the world and personal purpose within that meaning. a community to share that experience with. and rituals to bring the power of that experience into achievable. everyday life”—get redistributed into piecemeal sources.

Lowery’s film stages that redistribution as texture. Sam’s studio is steeped in the tools of devotion and the language of ritual. but those tools are also craft implements—scissors. pins. fabric—handled with the calm practicality of someone stitching together a performance. When Sam and Mary confront their past, they do arrive at Pentecost. Yet the descent isn’t clarified into certainty; it’s treated as a mystique that won’t submit to a single interpretation.

Taylor describes modern experience as life lived inside “buffered selves. ” contrasted with a “porous” world vulnerable to powers beyond control and understanding. The buffered self lives within “an immanent order… without reference to interventions from outside” (including God. angels. demons. ghosts. and more). Mary’s world looks like that buffer made flesh: fame, modernity, insulation. Sam’s is different, haunted even when no one labels it haunted. That’s where the film becomes quietly unsettling—because it suggests something slips through anyway. Taylor writes that “something replaces the spirit world of yore, even for the buffered self that has shut it out. That is, there is still something we need protection from.”.

In Mother Mary, protection takes the form of belief-ritual reassembled out of whatever is at hand.

Few scenes capture the modern condition as sharply as the exorcism moment. Sam gathers items from around her studio: a pair of scissors, some pins, a cutting of fabric. Mary asks what the items are for, unsettled—perhaps by their sharpness, perhaps by the seriousness beneath the objects. Sam answers cheerily that there’s “no true meaning to any object beyond our prescription.” Then the film turns the line into action: scissors as a key to unlock “obtrusive doors. ” pins as the “swords” they will wield. the cloth as a “shield” for the battle ahead.

But Sam isn’t treating the ritual as empty play. She believes these things will matter in the encounter with the transcendent and in getting through alive. That’s the modern impulse the film keeps returning to: the freedom to seek cosmic meaning outside religious institutions. paired with the heavy burden of deciding what meaning is.

The film’s world keeps one door closed even while opening others. Taylor imagines that people in a secular age are more likely to be moved by a “mystique” than by institutionalized religion itself. Lowery turns that into an atmosphere where the spirit might be real—or might just be the story we need. expressed through texture and timing. Is a shade a ghost or another hue of fabric?. Is the spirit real, or is it pain released from unresolved animosity?. The questions don’t come with an answer. They come with momentum.

And when Mother Mary ends—unclear, even frustrating for some viewers—the story doesn’t apologize for it. It leaves room for doubt, because doubt is part of modern life. Taylor writes about the modern individual who lives with uncertainty: “I am never. or only rarely. really sure. free of all doubt. untroubled by some objection” that their chosen path is the right one.

There’s an irony in the film’s theatrical premise: pop stardom becomes a venue for fans to become disciples. Exorcism becomes a means for reconciliation. Dance embodies possession. The modern world may be more porous than it pretends to be. and any spiritual presence remains hazy and indirect—refracted through mystique. not delivered as proof.

Mother Mary, then, isn’t only about ghosts. It’s about the hunger that keeps summoning them, even when modern life believes it has outgrown the need. The spiritual realm in Lowery’s hands is terrifying and fascinating at once. It can’t be pinned down. It can’t be fully dismissed. It arrives anyway.

Mother Mary David Lowery Anne Hathaway Michaela Coel modern transcendence Charles Taylor A Secular Age Tara Isabella Burton Strange Rites pop culture Pentecost exorcism mystique secular age film analysis