It's not shaping up as a great year for Anne Hathaway (see also "The Devil Wears Prada 2"):
MOTHER MARY (C-minus) - A couple of earnest performances can't salvage this ridiculous mess about a pop star hitting rock bottom and seeking out her former dressmaker and apparent soul mate in order to purge the evils besieging her and get back to being an insufferable beloved diva. It has an idiot plot and such a predictable script that you can shout out the lines of dialogue before the characters do. It is topped off with generic movie music that Anne Hathaway intones as if they were written for The Madonna and not just, say, a Madonna knockoff.
Hathaway goes by Mother Mary, known for her soulful ditties with religious overtones and for not only her outfits but a very Catholic series of halos that accompany them. A few years earlier she had a fall from an elevated stage -- one that would never exist in real life, because you could fall from it and break your neck -- a spectacle that some suspect might have been intentional, a cry for help.
Three days away from her big comeback show, she shows up in the rainy English countryside at the door of Sam (Michaela Coel) desperate for her former collaborator to create an outfit for her, by which she really means "Exorcise the demons from my soul, and also forgive me for dumping you without warning." At least that's what I was able to pick up from the mumbled or whispered dialogue that was sometimes drowned out by the incidental music. (Coel's heavy working-class accent doesn't help.)
Sam -- who in the opening scenes was able to psychically sense the arrival of Mother Mary -- will turn out to be a Magical Negro, wise beyond her years and gifted with the skills of an exorcist to go with her way around a pair of scissors and a measuring tape. (Speaking of tropes, would you believe we are treated to a pair of Chekhov's Scissors?) Coel has a facility with wry looks, and she has mastered this overstuffed dialogue that at times turns this into a virtual heavyweight bout. Hathaway's character is beyond distraught throughout, with little range for emotions.
The hurdle here is the halfway point -- a flashback scene in which Mother Mary and her entourage join a seance run by a diehard fan, played by the singer FKA Twigs, who unleashes a batshit-crazy performance (and more hard-to-decipher whispered/mumbled dialogue). That launches the movie into the realm of fantasy and gore. Mary and Sam bond over their respective visions of a similar specter, which takes the form of an anthropomorphic red dress.
At least the bizarre flashbacks break up what is an interminable back-and-forth between the characters (you'd think that with only 72 hours till the show there'd be more cutting and sewing and less heart-rending recriminations) on what happens to be a dark and stormy night. ("Frankenstein" shout-outs abound as thunder shudders outside of the rustic makeshift barn where Sam has housed her design business and studio.) Sacred iconography also runs rampant, with the main characters often backlit or standing humbly under shafts of white light.
This mess is the work of writer-director David Lowery, who at least can now say that he's been delivered from Casey Affleck ("Ain't Them Bodies Saints," "The Old Man and the Gun," "A Ghost Story"). But "Mother Mary" plays out like a millennial man's idea of how talented women might interact -- that they are all, deep down, witches, and that's a good thing. He has his moments visually. The flashback concert performances are not embarrassing. He fashions a scene in which Sam, who has sworn off listening to Mary's songs, demands that Mary demonstrate her latest choreography but without playing the song that it goes to; Hathaway (and, presumably a double) unleashes a silent Sia-like interpretive dance that briefly imbues the film with soul and wonder. Alas, it's quickly back to the chit-chat -- and then on to Lowery's stab at "The Exorcist."
The songs are mostly an all-star collaboration that involves Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX, and they are just generic enough to be believable. FKA Twigs contributes one as well. The tunes are sung by Hathway herself, though the artist credit really should read "Autotune ft. Anne Hathaway." The diva delivery and the haggard performance suggest this is Hathaway's vanity project, one that just cannot be rescued from ridicule by Coel's steely portrayal of a betrayed woman who now holds the power. Will she seek revenge or reunion? Torture yourself for 112 minutes and find out.
VERITY (D+) - Hathaway isn't much of a factor here, playing a catatonic character for most of this preposterous movie and then phoning in a few flashbacks. She leaves the bulk of this trainwreck -- imagine a Hallmark horror movie -- to a duo of duds, Dakota Johnson and Josh Hartnett, to carry this "suspense" film.
You could call this a psychological thriller if it weren't the dumbest paint-by-numbers movie-of-the-week knockoff in years. Johnson plays Lowen Ashleigh (as if she had stepped out of a Harlequin Romance novel), a talented but under-read writer who is recruited on a secret mission to ghost-write the upcoming book series by best-selling author Verity Crawford, who is in a catatonic state after a car crash, an event that is being kept hush-hush. That is strike one here (among so many fastballs down the middle that I lost count) -- the idea that a publisher would be able to keep these things out of the public view.
Lowen will take on the gig (which pays her deep into six figures), and of course will fall for the sweet, hunky husband, Jeremy (Hartnett), with whom she has a macabre meet-cute in the opening scene. She will also discover a thumb drive with a detailed "confession" from Verity, which makes Lowen believe that Verity had a hand in the death of a child and faked the accident and injuries.
And so we get multiple horror-lite scenes of Lowen appearing to catch Verity moving or throwing glances her way, with other characters convincing her that, oh, she's just seeing things. I have always been able to tolerate Johnson's lethargic acting style ("A Bigger Splash" is a high point), but here she just alternates between being dull and devolving into hysterics that grow comical by the halfway point. This is also styled as an "erotic thriller," but it delivers on neither promise. The scenes between Johnson and Hartnett wouldn't pass muster in a daytime soap opera, and the attempts at suspense fall flat at every turn. You'll find a cliche around every corner. (Both "Verity" and "Mother Mary" include trite bathtub scenes featuring "movie water" -- water that's eerily milky, so as to shield the A-list actress from full-frontal nudity.)
If you don't walk out by the halfway mark, get ready for the most far-fetched ending since the "It was all a dream" episode of "Dallas" back in the day. This script is apparently quite faithful to its source material, the novel Verity by Colleen Hoover, and maybe it plays better as a page-turner. Or, perhaps, everyone involved is, like Verity, just a hack cashing a paycheck.
BONUS TRACKS
"Holy Spirit," the centerpiece song from "Mother Mary," is typical of the generic collaboration that includes Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff:
Better, though, is the FKA Twigs contribution, "My Mouth Is Lonely for You":
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