A24’s Best-Kept Secret (or Mistake?): What Happened to 'Mother Mary'?
Shot, shelved, and still puzzling its own creator.
What happens when one of independent cinema’s most enigmatic directors makes a film even he can’t quite explain? That’s the question hanging over Mother Mary, the latest feature from David Lowery — a filmmaker known for balancing quiet introspection (A Ghost Story) with sweeping fantasy (Peter Pan and Wendy).
His new project promised a return to minimalist form: a dialogue-heavy, two-hander starring Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway. Filming wrapped in August 2024. But since then — no trailer, no premiere, no festival slot. A24 has yet to break the silence. Could Mother Mary be joining the ranks of quietly vanished films like Terrence Malick’s Voyage of Time or Lynne Ramsay’s abandoned Polaris?
At its centre is a fraught reunion between a reclusive costume designer and a disgraced pop star — once collaborators, now strangers. Aside from a brief appearance by Hunter Schafer, the film is largely confined to one location. The tension, by all accounts, is internal. Lowery has been startlingly open about his own ambivalence. At the Melbourne International Film Festival, he described the film as "the hardest thing I’ve ever done" and "a weird, weird film." On The Last Video Store podcast, he added: "I’ve been wondering, 'what is this movie?' I know what I set out to make… but it is so wild."
Still, even in silence, Mother Mary is gathering intrigue. On r/oscarrace, one Redditor called it "dark and weird… possibly with horror elements," likening it to Black Swan. That kind of psychological unease — especially wrapped in theatrical minimalism — is the sort of thing British critics tend to devour, isn’t it? After all, the nation that canonised Repulsion, The Servant, and The Souvenir has a long-standing affection for emotional implosion under aesthetic restraint.
So is Mother Mary a buried gem or a beautifully misjudged experiment? For now, Mother Mary remains unseen — but not unspoken about. And if Lowery’s instincts are anything to go by, perhaps the film’s greatest strength lies in its uncertainty. After all, isn’t cinema sometimes at its most interesting when even the filmmaker doesn’t have all the answers?
