Mother Mary Will Mess With Your Head

Anne Hathaway is both a pop star and a woman in need of exorcism in Mother Mary, a psychodrama from writer-director David Lowery, out Friday. The film, with an early 75% rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, features music from Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX, and cast member FKA Twigs, and delivers religious imagery everywhere, from Mary's signature halo headpieces to a possessing spirit in the form of a red sheet. Here's what critics are saying:

• Lowery conjures a "mesmerizing" world with images "that permanently etch themselves into your memory" in this "beguiling but never entirely satisfying fable" about a superstar, Mary, and her one-time designer, Sam, writes Vulture's Alison Willmore. It's largely a story about the breakup of a friendship and absolution, with Mary's apparent possession symbolizing Sam's lingering resentment.
• It's "wonderfully, gloriously weird" and "a f---ing head trip," with the potential to enter "your own psyche like a malevolent specter," writes Rolling Stone's David Fear. Michaela Coel, who plays the designer reunited with her former collaborator after a decade of pain, emerges as "a sui generis generational talent ... as gifted a performer as she is a writer," while costume designer Bina Daigeler's work can't be praised enough, Fear writes.

• Nick Schager at the Daily Beast sees it more as "an ungodly mess" whose "only success is in eliciting a headache-inducing number of eye rolls." "There's distress, there's agony, and then there's the overcooked torment that is the one note Hathaway repeatedly strikes," he writes, adding Coel also appears "strained and insincere." He largely blames Lowery: "It's less that the director loses his handle on the story so much as he barely has one in the first place."
• Mostly focused on two people in a single location, the film grows "increasingly surreal" and "visually captivating" but also "more tiresome" as it goes on, writes Jake Coyle at the AP. "Hathaway makes not just a believable pop star but an indelible portrait of an artist's ego in extremes," but "the movie belongs to Coel," the exorcist, Coyle writes, giving the film 2.5 stars out of 4.