David Lowery’s Mother Mary turns Taylor Swift footage into horror

David Lowery’s Mother Mary takes the polished visual grammar of Taylor Swift’s Reputation concert film and twists it into a psychological horror story about celebrity image, performance, and collapse. The A24 release, set for April 17, 2026, centers on the pop star Mother Mary, played by Anne Hathaway, as she reunites with her estranged former costume designer and best friend, Sam Anselm, played by Michaela Coel, on the eve of a comeback performance.

That premise gives Lowery a sharp artistic gamble: he is not simply borrowing pop imagery, but recasting a piece of superstar spectacle as a site of dread. Lowery has said Swift’s Reputation concert film was a key influence and that he studied it shot by shot, a level of attention that explains why Mother Mary feels less like a standard music drama than an act of aesthetic translation. The question hanging over the movie is whether that translation exposes celebrity iconography as hollow machinery or just borrows enough of its shine to make the horror legible.

The project has been building since March 2023, when A24 announced Hathaway and Coel as the leads. Hunter Schafer joined the cast in May 2023, and the ensemble later expanded to include FKA Twigs, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Alba Baptista, Sian Clifford, Isaura Barbé-Brown and Atheena Frizzell. Production wrapped in Germany in July 2024 after a fourteen-month, multi-location shoot, a drawn-out schedule that seems to match the film’s deliberate collision of pop excess and psychological unease.

Hathaway described the film in July 2025 as a “very weird movie” and said the Germany shoot had left people “temporarily, mildly insane.” She also said she had to apologize to castmates because of what might come out of her performance, a comment that suggests Lowery was pushing beyond camp into something rawer and more destabilizing. In a story built around a star image cracking under pressure, that kind of offscreen strain becomes part of the texture.

The music team signals the same high-low collision. Jack Antonoff, Charli XCX and FKA Twigs wrote the songs, Daniel Hart composed the original score, and A24 is releasing a companion soundtrack, Mother Mary: Greatest Hits, the same day as the film. A24 says the original songs are performed by Hathaway and co-written by Antonoff, Charli XCX, FKA Twigs and Hathaway herself.

Recent reviews have described Mother Mary as a watchable two-hander that mutates into a head-scratching ghost story, which may be the point. Lowery’s film appears to test whether celebrity iconography can survive being stripped of its commercial reassurance and pushed into prestige-cinema horror. The result is either a risky reinvention of pop imagery or a carefully dressed wound.