Mother Mary Could Have Only Been A Ghost Story
David Lowery reveals what possessed him to turn his pop drama into a full-on phantasmagoria.
Much of Mother Mary, David Lowery’s eerie new pop drama, takes place in the cavernous workshop of Michaela Coel’s Sam Anselm, the former fashion designer and former friend of Anne Hathaway’s eponymous pop star. The two of them have reunited after Mother Mary parted ways with her longtime designer after her pop career took off. It only took a horrific accident, in which Mary took a hard fall (unintentionally or intentionally) from a floating stage during one of her performances, to bring them back together. Mary, who has finally recovered, is planning her comeback, and the only one who can make her the right dress for her performance is Sam.
The first half of the movie plays out as an intimate chamber piece between Mary and Sam, the two of them rehashing long-buried grudges and betrayals, as we get occasional flashes to Mary’s extravagant concert performances. But then, Mother Mary takes a turn. Mary shows Sam the dance choreography for her new song, “Spooky Action,” which she had written about a preternatural experience she recently had. As Mary silently dances to the song, she seems to become possessed, writhing and convulsing in a frightening display of overwhelming emotion. This kind of scene almost always calls to mind the subway scene in Andrzej Żuławski’s polarizing 1981 horror film Possession, in which Isabelle Adjani becomes overtaken by a fit of unadulterated mania. Was this an intentional homage? Yes and no, Lowery tells Inverse.
“What's remarkable to me now, is that that wasn't an influence on the dance sequence, but it was an influence on so many things that happened after the dance sequence,” Lowery says. “We had so many other things we were thinking about for that dance, but the way influences bubble up sometimes, you don't realize until you're done that that was probably very much on our minds.”
Mother Mary, before her fateful accident.
When Lowery, Hathaway, and choreographer Dani Vitale worked on that sequence, they mostly wanted it to convey what Mary was going through at that moment: “We never hear that song, but what is she trying to convey? What is she trying to communicate? What's she trying to express?" Lowery says. “And we built an entire vocabulary of expression through dance that Anne could draw from.”
He and Hathaway never talked about Possession during or after shooting that sequence. But when Coel saw that scene, she called Lowery up, “and she's like, ‘Are you a fan of this movie?’” Lowery recalls.
So what was the actual influence that Possession had on Mother Mary? Well, that’s an answer for when the film makes its true shift into another genre: horror.
Warning! Spoilers ahead for Mother Mary.
Mother Mary Ending Explained
Mary and Sam perform an exorcism.
About halfway through Mother Mary, it’s revealed that there’s more haunting Mary and Sam than bad blood. There’s a literal ghost.
Sam recalls her suffering over being abandoned by Mary as her star rose, and we see a flashback of Sam returning from seeing Mary in concert, to find something at the foot of her bed. It’s a strange, red mass, which seems to be made of silk or blood or a combination of both. As Sam lets it out of her room, it leaves a trail of red behind it. That imagery, specifically, was inspired by Possession. “The Carlo Rambaldi creature from Possession, I just love looking at it. It leaves a trail of goo on the floor or on the bed. You see a little bit of that in [Sam’s] ghost story,” Lowery says.
As Sam recounts this story, Mary is shocked. Sam is not the only one to have encountered this ghost — Mary has not only seen it, but it has trapped itself inside her. After a seance gone wrong left her with a gash in her hand, the ghost had appeared before Mary and embedded itself in the wound. That’s what caused the accident: She had seen the ghost and stepping back in shock, had fallen.
So the two decide to excise it, by performing a makeshift seance in the workshop. They light candles, and offer drops of blood to the ghost, before Mary realizes the ghost needs more; taking Sam’s scissors, she slices her chest open and the ghost emerges. Sam and Mary pull the ghost out of Mary’s chest, and it becomes a blood-red fabric out of which Sam can make the dress. But the ending leaves us with one lingering question: is the ghost real, or is it a metaphor?
The ghost was inspired by the creature in Possession, Lowery reveals.
“Well, there's my interpretation of it, but I don't want to step on anyone else's when they watch the movie,” Lowery says. “I believe that what Sam says and [what] Mother Mary also says, which is that she knows what she saw, but she also knows it wasn't real. And both of those things can be true.”
So why a ghost? Lowery, who has dabbled with the horror genre before like in A Ghost Story and The Green Knight, has always been fascinated by ghosts, “probably because I'm so fascinated with mortality and the finite nature of things, and I'm always wondering if there is more.” For the record, he considers Mother Mary his first true-blue horror movie, even if the ghost at the center of it is questionable. But the ghost, real or not (or both), is necessary for the story that he’s trying to tell.
“What the characters were trying to talk about could no longer be conveyed through language, and it needed to take on a more ephemeral form,” Lowery says. “So, as they begin to dig into their pasts and talk about their respective memories of this very traumatic period in their lives, I knew that words could not suffice, and we needed a visual representation of the emotion that they were conveying back and forth. I think we've all felt those moments where one person transfers their bad energy to us. And we feel, we take it on. And that can be a great relief for the person that's passing it on, because all of a sudden it's no longer on their shoulders, but then we contain it. And that in and of itself is sort of an act of possession. You're being possessed by someone else's negative energy.”
Sam makes the dress out of the ghost.
That, to Lowery, is the ghost: “negative energy [that] goes back and forth.”
“It can transmute,” he concludes. “And I felt that the language of a horror film, of a haunted house, of a ghost story, was the perfect metaphor for that conveyance of energy.”
