Let's make one thing clear: Mother Mary is weird.
As well as being one of Anne Hathaway's many 2026 movie releases, it sees I May Destroy You creator Michaela Coel deliver some truly delicious disses, and it tells the story of a destructive, epic relationship between a famous popstar and her costume designer and their attempts to reconnect over one night.
Featuring a red, floaty ghost of sorts and flashes of performances from Hunter Schafer, Kaia Gerber, FKA Twigs – who plays a delightfully woo-woo medium – and Fleabag's Sian Clifford. There are even IRL reports of hauntings on set.
But the most jarring part of my viewing experience when watching Mother Mary was when I realised, about one hour into David Lowery's spooky take on the intensity of both the pop music industry and female relationships, that a man had not yet spoken on screen. By the end, one still hadn't.
“Everybody who speaks [in the film] — how amazing — is female,” Coel confirmed to The Times in an interview. She adds that the only men she can recall are backing dancers. And, after consulting IMDB after watching the film, we can confirm that she's right.
We talk about the Bechdel Test, which assesses the measure of the representation of women in film by asking if it features two named female characters, who talk with each other, and the conversation is about anything other than a man/men. But it's something else when there's – on the surface, at least – no male agenda to be found in the film.
But female representation in a male-dominated industry like Hollywood requires more than just Bechdel Test tick box requirements. It necessitates male directors – like David Lowery, who directed Mother Mary – to take on big projects with big Hollywood talent and choose to steer the narrative away from a predominantly male gaze. To give female storytellers the space to create, perform and inspire outside of the shadow that the patriarchy casts on them so easily. And until the day that there is parity between opportunities for male and female directors – with women behind the camera working on just 8% of 2024's top 100 films – the availability of this space remains so very important.
Without a hint of male agenda, dialogue or influence, the film completely focuses on the complicated bond between Hathaway's Mother Mary – a mysterious mega popstar who seems, inexplicably at first, miserable about her own fame – and Coel's Sam. After Sam agrees to design a dress for a Mother Mary performance that is a matter of days away, the pair begin to reflect on the power of their bond in previous years, raking over betrayal, broken hearts and hatred and recognising how closely these three feelings can be woven together.
In an interview, Lowery explained that Mother Mary stemmed from his mission to “do a movie with just two actors in a room having a long heart-to-heart… a really gentle filmmaking experience.” The project then became the hardest thing he'd ever done, he says, when he decided to make the protagonist a popstar – basing Mother Mary on none other than Taylor Swift herself. “I definitely brought a lot of Taylor Swift to the table in terms of who Mother Mary was," Lowery told Empire. "I would often would be like, ‘Imagine Taylor Swift in ten or 15 years – that’s sort of who this character could be.’”
It feels significant, then, that within an industry as male-dominated as the music industry, Lowery chose to model his protagonist on a woman who has railed against the patriarchy so many times, from the way she writes songs to the way she dresses to calling out how deeply entrenched misogyny is in our culture.
There's also an unspoken suggestion that Mother Mary and Sam had something of a queer relationship or connection. The way they move, touch and speak to each other certainly alludes to a more intense bond than one that was just platonic. But what feels different about how their relationship is depicted on screen – and certainly in rejection of the male gaze – is that it doesn't sexualise or sensationalise this connection.
Hollywood has oversexualised queer relationships onscreen for years. Call Me By Your Name won an Oscar and a BAFTA and sparked memes galore, but was also criticised for popularising exploitative, age-gap relationships. From Sex and the City's failure to flesh out Samantha's lesbian relationship to be any more than a sexy dalliance to The OC often portraying Mischa Barton's Marissa Cooper time dating Olivia Wilde's Alex as a vehicle for the male characters' pleasure and attraction, so many lesbian relationships are portrayed in an overly sexualised fashion with minimal substance, to please the hetero male gaze. Adding nuance to such dynamics with two big Hollywood names feels like a radical (and needed) choice.
So, is Mother Mary completely devoid of the male gaze? Have Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel stepped out of its shadow? As Hollywood currently stands and the insidious nature of the patriarchy, I'm not sure if that's quite possible yet. But I would say that it's a definite step towards the light.
