Possession(s): "Mother Mary"

Well, April is supposed to be the studios' R&D month, devoted to risks, gambles and shots in the dark. It's no longer Oscar season, so the movies don't have to pretend to be respectable, and it's not yet summertime, so they don't have to be IMAX big. Mother Mary, A24's choice of counterprogramming to this weekend's dubious sure thing Michael, is an old-school women's picture approached from a wildly eccentric angle by the ever-unpredictable David Lowery (Ain't Them Bodies Saints, Pete's Dragon, A Ghost Story). At its heart: a power struggle in the costume department. A scarred, nervy and generally washed out Anne Hathaway is the Gaga-like pop sensation who arrives amid a thunderstorm at the country retreat/workshop of diva costumier Michaela Coel. She's hoping to come away with a dress fit for what she insinuates will be her farewell performance, but progress in this matter is soon complicated by the fact this pair have a past: they may indeed have once been an item, and the designer has retained some measure of resentment over the way the singer subsequently stepped out in other designers' clothes. In theory, then, this is a clash of artistic visions and temperaments: the deeply damaged soul versus the prickly provocateur peering loftily down from her drawing board. Yet even that feels too conventional a reading for what's really going on here. In actual fact, those of us watching on from the cheap seats soon find ourselves scrambling to maintain our bearings and marbles, while also reaching out for a few urgently needed and reassuring reference points.

When Paul Thomas Anderson, for one, moved into this field, he returned with what was, in Phantom Thread, his most hemmed-in project, a Californian's impersonation of Brit period-flick reticence. Mother Mary initially appears far more theatrical: it opens with a long reunion scene in which Hathaway and Coel talk in a way no two human beings have ever talked, and the former performs an interpretative dance routine - with its inferences of demonic possession, it's more Linda Blair than Lionel - to a tune we don't hear. Those trailers weren't lying, one concludes: this is a decidedly odd one, and you may well spend some of it - as I did - wondering whether a script hasn't landed in the wrong pigeonhole. Sudden, stark in-camera scene and lighting changes indicate the director of the scarcely less batshit The Green Knight has set his sights on producing a better-dressed revival of the Sleuth-like filmed play; but then Sleuth, Deathtrap and their ilk never featured a scene involving a possessed FKA Twigs. That Mother Mary eventually won me over had a lot to do with these actresses, who apparently got whatever there was to get in this material, and who elevate it to a rare intensity. Something really does seem to be at stake in the matter of Hathaway versus Coel: it's soft vs. spiky, white privilege vs. lingering slights, fairytale princess vs. perhaps the most extraordinary looking performer working today. In the second half, Lowery's gift for image generation returns to the forefront; although shot on a far smaller budget, his concert scenes - reframing pop as something mythic, closer to a ritual or rite - make the Taylor Swift movie seem newly unimaginative. So there's another battle going on within Mother Mary: between the stagey and the cinematic, and - in the eyes of this judge - the latter just nicks it on points. Lowery's film doesn't attain the layered surrealism of, say, Peter Strickland's In Fabric, another treatise on the alchemy of creation fixated on a haunted red dress; some part of me couldn't shake the suspicion this is an artefact designed to justify the existence (and hefty pricetag) of a lavish, A24-published coffee table tome. Yet as flop Anne Hathaway vehicles go, Mother Mary is more intriguing, even fascinating, than 2023's Eileen - and it dares to go places next week's conventionally tailored The Devil Wears Prada 2 likely won't.

Mother Mary is now playing in selected cinemas.