Anne Hathaway is convincing as a pop diva in the flawed but compelling Mother Mary

Mother Mary (M18)

112 minutes, opens on May 14 ★★★☆☆

The story: Pop star Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) makes a surprise visit to the country estate of her estranged best friend, the celebrated costume designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), looking tired and desperate. The performer is about to kick off her comeback tour and will do anything – no matter how humiliating – to get a dress from Sam. Over the course of one strange night, the women come to grips with personal hurts, public adulation and the intrusion of a supernatural force.

This mix of psychological drama, meditation on fame and the self-destructive nature of the creative life is an unwieldy, confusing mess.

Here is the “but” – it all hangs together, just barely, through sumptuous visuals and strong original music by singer-songwriters Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff, responsible for hits by American singer Taylor Swift and New Zealand-born artiste Lorde, among others.

American film-maker David Lowery’s films deal with time and memory. A Ghost Story (2017) has the ghost of the title criss-cross timestreams, investigating love and its persistence across centuries; The Green Knight (2021) turns a mediaeval poem into a dream-like drama about heroism and myth-making.

Hathaway’s pop princess character is Mother Mary, in a clear nod to Madonna, arguably the first diva of the modern era to grasp the idea that what fans truly want is the invented image, not authenticity.

Lowery plays with the idea of Mary as a plastic fantasy, but rather than dismiss her deliberately manufactured personas as trivial or dishonest, it is the opposite – Mary is only truly herself when she inhabits the right identity, wearing a dress from Sam, the only person who understood her.

The Pygmalion myth – the story of an artist who falls in love with his sculpture, which then becomes a living woman after he kisses it – is given a fresh interpretation.

Sam and Mary are simultaneously each other’s creator and creation, locked in a dance of co-dependency. In one memorable scene set in Sam’s workshop-barn, the emotional dance becomes disquietingly literal.

Hathaway has clearly put in the work to be an amalgam of Beyonce, Lady Gaga and Swift – ambitious, talented women driven by superhuman levels of grit.

Her character, the epitome of confidence on stage, is a shattered mess in front of Sam, and Hathaway is convincing as both the larger-than-life stadium-filler and the regretful seeker of forgiveness. Coel is stunning as the wronged party, at once icy and wrathful.

The first two acts are tense, dialogue-driven two-handers set in the one-room space of the barn, opening out occasionally to Mary’s concerts, spectaculars driven by music and visual set pieces that pay homage to Catholic imagery.

In the third act, the psychological drama gives way to something much weirder and hallucinatory – and tinged with body horror – when a supernatural force appears.

The thread’s fairy-tale tone is jarringly at odds with the psychological groundedness of the first two acts. But then, it would not be a Lowery movie without some risk-taking and open-endedness.

Hot take: A gorgeous, bewildering mess that almost earns its ambitions on the strength of two powerhouse performances and a killer soundtrack.