Something wicked this way comes. After years of absence, Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) arrives at the country estate of Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), her stylist in a past life as a global pop star, without invitation or notice. Clearly in distress, she convinces her dear friend and former collaborator and confidant to craft a new dress for her upcoming comeback performance happening minutes from midnight in three days’ time. As the two begin to discuss the dress, the performance, and catching up over lost time, they realize that even a world apart, they both experienced a similar, haunting phenomenon.

With a popstar film always being an unrealized thematic passion project, David Lowery finally delivers his long gestating Mother Mary for A24 who platformed the heady, music-backed phycological drama on a little over 1,100 domestic screens. Running 112-minutes, the film is verbose to say the least, with the first act – a solid 35 minutes – acting as an extended two-hander conversation set in Sam’s barn-turned-workspace, giving audiences the feeling that they are watching a play instead of a film. This theatrical approach is a wise one at is allows audiences to fall into the lull of the film and be more accepting of the haunting aspects that the narrative explores in its latter half without being so caught up on the realism that is often sought after in stories once they are projected on the silver screen.

Anytime a filmmaker embarks to tell the story of a creative, especially a fictionalized one, the largest hurdle is selling the audience on the character’s fame. Unlike to droves that pack the stadium for Mother Mary’s shows, we do not know the songs being played and have no previous allegiance to her as we would the central figure of a music biopic. Instead, the filmmaker must turn us from agnostics to ardent fans immediately, or the story will rarely come together. Leading the charge here for Lowery is music production and writing team Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX, with FKA Twigs also contributing original songwriting in addition to her role as Imogen; a Mother Mary acolyte who opens a portal to the spirit world for the performer after a show one evening. The songs, costumes, and performances all give us enough touchstones to understand what kind of artist Mother Mary is. Hard to describe in a single breath, she is an amalgamation of the star power of Madonna, dressed in bold costuming style of Lady Gaga, and with a voice that floats through the cosmos with the ethereality of Aurora.

Hathaway is more than serviceable when she needs to inhabit this otherworldly figure, but Lowrey’s script spends so little time with her on a pedestal that when the curtain closes and she is left backstage and out of the public view, we do not feel as informed as we should about this character given her role in the totality of the story. Lowrey instead chooses to show us visually the toll of performance on her as Andrew Droz Palermo’s and Rina Yang’s camera tracks her moving up and back down the stairs, night after night, performance after performance, until she eventually falls; though not the fall teased in a rare pre-studio credits card shot. Occurring late in the film, and despite how beautifully rendered as this trite plight of the performer is, it spends valuable runtime informing a conflict separate from the much more personal and festering one, the scabs of which were being both ripped back opened and bandaged back up between Mother Mary and Sam in the magnetic first act so that by the time things should be coming together, our duo is split and we feel as if we are treading water instead of actually coming to an understanding of the mystery.

Some of this is, because, if one were to ask Lowery – or at the very least, the head of the film’s marketing campaign – “this is not a ghost story.” Nor is it a love story. So, what does that leave? It is an experience. Mother Mary is a film that is at its best when it is allowed to roll over its audience, and while it can be frustrating to try and track these individual moments or references that we are not privy to of both Mother Mary’s and Sam’s shared past, the details are not necessary to feel connected to the story that we are nevetheless being allowed to lean our ear against the door to or peek through the keyhole at.

Dressed in dazzling gowns and bathed in bright stage lights, Mother Mary only uses fame and stardom as an entry point to tell a much deeper and more personal story. Overflowing with metaphor to the point where even the characters themselves comment on the ridiculousness of it all, at a certain point even they stop trying to make it all make sense because what they are experiencing together is something greater than even the lushest, floweriest of language can accurately convey. Ultimately, it is revealed that the two have been fated to reunite from a shared experience with a ghost, one that takes the form of a red mass of fabric; red, the color of love, but also of anger.

This ghost first appears to Sam shortly after the altercation that caused the schism between the two sapphically-alluded artists. It enters this world through a wound left behind from a shattered tooth, bleeding out one night, pooling at the foot of Sam’s bed a mass not unlike a dissected, still-beating heart; the personification of the last of the love that she held for Mother Mary, escaping from a deeply hidden-from-the-outside but, as anyone who has ever experience tooth pain will know, omnipresent place. She orders the ghost to leave – the first exorcism of the film – before Lowery cuts us back to the studio. Lowery then derails his film with an extended flashback, far removed from the main action of the story that finds Mother Mary spending the night with super fan Ingrid who brings out a Ouija board and makes contact with an unknown spirit. As her body convulses around the room, we begin to see similarities between Mother Mary’s choreography for her new song shown off in a wordless dance in Act One and this possession. Upon hearing the conclusion of Mother Mary’s story we learn that she begins to be haunted by a red, morphing shape shortly after this haunting evening. This diversion on its own is quite interesting and plays well within Lowery’s established affinity for dark fairytales, but within the context of the film it is all bridging material that really just takes us away from the core of the story: the performances, specifically Coel’s who is the sneaky star of the film, are so magnetic that anytime spent away from the pair’s extended tit for tat risks loosing audiences as we have been allowed out of the dark, hewn walls of Sam’s studio.

Thankfully, though, for the final act of the film – short as it may be – it is immense and it overflows with Lowery’s specific type of imaginative magic. A needle becomes a sword. A veil becomes armor. Sam mounts an exorcism and as the two sit in the candlelit circle together, and Mother Mary creates a wound of her own for which the red ghost can escape. The messy metaphors have never been more apparent, but also, they have never mattered less. Everything has culminated to this evocative display of the pain of betrayal, of loss, of the shattering of an image we paint of people we hold most dear to us. While it may not be the cleanest way to wrap up this admittedly messy – and, gleefully so – narrative, it is undeniably powerful and one that lingers long after the credits roll. With a little bit of resolving action that can be read either as a triumphant coming back together – or, perhaps, yet another betrayal – Mother Mary finishes on a high note that pierces through the air and freezes time. While we may have been uninitiated a mere 100 minutes prior, as “Dark Cradle” plays across the end credits and Hathaway once more channels the spirit that possessed her through dance, we are all placed under Mother Mary’s spell as she sings to us her damning lullaby. It is no surprise, then, that Sam has also found herself once again entranced by Mother Mary, but we pray that we may we all be blessed, then, with Sam’s same resolve to not listen to the siren’s call any longer and allow our own wounds to heal, if only for a moment.