Reception
On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 69% of 202 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 6.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Anne Hathaway acquits herself well as a believable pop star in Mother Mary, a modish psychodrama that can be frustratingly obtuse but has style to spare." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 58 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.
David Ehrlich of IndieWire gave the film an A− and wrote, "It's all rather vague and uncertain, like the contours of a rotting old friendship; the movie's surfaces are as simple as the lyrics of a pop song, and its depths as rich and boundless as the feelings that same pop song might summon." Brian Tallerico of RogerEbert.com gave the film 3 out of 4 stars and described it as "another story about the intersection of fame and art, but it's not like one you've seen before, a two-hander that owes as much to The Exorcist as it does to Lady Gaga." Kevin Maher of The Times rated the film 4 out of 5 stars, praising how "there is so much to love, even adore" about the film, starting with Hathaway.
Robbie Collin of The Telegraph rated the film 2 out of 5 stars, billing it as a "beautiful yet ungraspable psychological drama". Richard Brody of The New Yorker observed that "the result feels like a Hollywood production done on the cheap, with strenuous efforts to mask its small scale". Stephanie Zacharek of Time decried how "arty and self-conscious, [the film] is just a slog". Owen Gleiberman of Variety lamented that Mother Mary "turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet's Vox Lux".
