Name: Mother Mary
Director: David Lowery
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Music, Thriller
Released: 2026-04-17
Duration: 112 min
Cast: Anne Hathaway, Michaela Coel, Hunter Schafer, FKA twigs, Sian Clifford

A pop diva crouches over a costume table in a barn-quiet workroom, asking the one person she has not spoken to in a long time whether she still knows how to perform. David Lowery’s new feature opens on that question and refuses to let it resolve into a comeback story. The Russian-market tagline lays out the spine in a sentence: this is not a love story, and it is not a ghost story. Both claims are the kind of thing you only have to say if the audience is on its way to assuming otherwise, and Mother Mary is built so that the audience can do exactly that, then watch the film withdraw the assumption.

The pop star is Mother Mary. The estranged best friend and former costume designer is Sam Anselm. They were the creative engine of a stadium-era persona, and they have not spoken in a long time; the script treats that distance as a fact, not a setup. The reunion happens on the eve of a comeback performance everyone around them has more invested in than they do, and Lowery shoots the rehearsal week as a haunted house in which the apparitions are old decisions, sample fabric, and unfinished sentences. There is no horror-genre apparatus. There is only the way two people who used to share a vocabulary try to use it again.

Anne Hathaway has been working toward this kind of register for a while, and Lowery gives her permission to occupy it without rooting the picture in either glamour or breakdown. Mother Mary is shot as a working professional first, the diction precise, the body language coachable, the breakdown technical rather than confessional, which is the harder choice and the right one for the film’s premise. Michaela Coel is not a co-star here; she is the structural counterweight, and Coel plays Sam Anselm as someone who has spent her time away from the persona learning what the persona costs to maintain. Hunter Schafer’s Hilda, FKA twigs’s Imogen, and Sian Clifford’s Jade fill out the orbit around the comeback machine without any of them being asked to anchor the picture they are circling.

Lowery has spent the second half of his filmography testing how slowly a story can move before genre stops applying. His chamber-grief register, his Arthurian register, and his Disney-studio register are not different directors; they are the same director watching where a metaphysical premise breaks once you commit to it for ninety-plus minutes. Mother Mary maps onto that pattern in a specific way: the pop diva is the apparatus that lets him write a music-business chamber piece without writing a music-business chamber piece. The film leans on production-design intimacy, sustained close-ups of hands at a worktable, and a score that knows when not to score, which is the working method this director arrives with already in place.

The TMDB genre stack, drama, fantasy, music, thriller, is unusually honest about what the picture is doing. The fantasy slot is not a creature; it is the persona herself, framed by the film as a constructed apparition the two women built together and then watched walk away from them. The thriller slot is interior, the question being whether the rehearsal week ends in a stage and not a hospital, and the music slot is treated as a working condition, not a soundtrack opportunity. The thriller cues, when they arrive, look more like the unfinished business of a friendship than like genre escalation.

Mother Mary does not resolve the questions a pop-comeback drama is normally supposed to resolve. The film is uninterested in whether the show goes well, whether the album is any good, or whether the audience comes back; it locates its tension entirely inside the rehearsal-room reunion, which means viewers who came for music-industry scaffolding will find that scaffolding deliberately undernourished. The principal pair also does most of the heavy lifting; the supporting orbit functions more as texture than as parallel arc, and a viewer who wants Hunter Schafer or FKA twigs to carry weight equal to their casting will find the runtime allocated elsewhere. The tagline’s denial, ‘this is not a story about love and ghosts’, is, as a piece of marketing, both true and disingenuous in the way Lowery’s marketing often is.

The principal cast credits Anne Hathaway as Mother Mary and Michaela Coel as Sam Anselm, with Hunter Schafer as Hilda, FKA twigs as Imogen, and Sian Clifford as Jade. Lowery directs from his own script. The picture runs one hour and fifty-two minutes, and the genre mix, drama, fantasy, music, and thriller, is the working description the project has carried through the trailer drop and into the trade press’s first read. The ‘Final Trailer’ beat is positioned as the last marketing landmark before the wide-market rollout, which suggests the distributor is finished setting the table and now wants the picture to do its own arguing.

Mother Mary opens in U.S. theaters on April 17, 2026, with regional rollouts staggered through the spring and into the summer. Greece is the earliest European entry on April 16, followed by Estonia, Latvia, Turkey, and Taiwan on April 17, the Philippines on April 22, Puerto Rico on April 23, Canada and the United Kingdom and Ireland on April 24, and Indonesia the same week. A clustered May rollout adds Thailand on May 7, then Australia, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, Singapore, and Vietnam in mid-May, with Germany and Portugal in late May. Spain holds back until July 31. There is no confirmed Korean theatrical release on the books, although the film has been localized for that market under the title 마더 메리. The picture runs one hour and fifty-two minutes and is being positioned as a director-driven prestige release rather than a wide-genre play, which, on Lowery’s working record, is the rollout cadence that fits how his pictures tend to find an audience.

Tags: Anne Hathaway, David Lowery, drama, Hunter Schafer, Michaela Coel, Mother Mary, thrillers