In 2024, Brady Corbet’s Oscar-winning “The Brutalist” used architecture as a metaphor for Hollywood filmmaking — the grinding hustle required to craft something epic in scope, infused with a personal story, but ultimately dependent on patrons who might exploit artists rather than support them. One could argue that “Mother Mary” is indie auteur David Lowery’s “Hollywood movie” too, in that it’s a film that explores the personal hazards of public-facing creative collaboration, using pop music superstardom as the metaphor for filmmaking.

Both film and music — when made on a grand, industrial scale — require collaboration, a team of people who create an aesthetic, and one star, or figurehead, to represent the image. These stars make auteur theory an all too easy answer about who gets the credit for creative genius that comes from many minds, but it runs the risk of significant contributors feeling discarded or resentful.

Lowery explores this in depth in “Mother Mary,” while suggesting that these same hurt feelings can be a source of creative energy, pulled from the heart, slapped on a table and shaped into something beautiful. Art can come from the troubling emotions and complex relationships that are often the byproduct of a creative process that is messy, human and complicated.

“Mother Mary” is a phantasmagoric fever dream of a gothic pop opera, but it is also a single setting two-hander that pits two of our most mesmerizing actresses against each other in a verbal pas de deux of wordy accusation and buried betrayals.

International music superstar Mother Mary (Anne Hathaway) shows up at the English estate of famed fashion designer Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), her former costume designer. Mary is bedraggled and wet, begging for a gown for a comeback performance in a few days. Despite Sam’s simmering anger at the way things ended between them, she drags Mary into an old barn for a fitting, where they will work out their issues, whether Mary wants to or not.

There, Sam unleashes reams upon reams of monologues about their past at a teary Mary, who fills in a few gaps. We frequently cut away to Mother Mary concert performances and flashbacks that the women watch like stage plays in the barn. Mary dances; Sam confesses she hasn’t listened to her music in years, practically spitting venom at her former friend.

It goes on and on until you’re internally begging Lowery to get to the point already. And then suddenly he does. This is a ghost story, a possession tale. But we already knew it was going somewhere dangerous from the outset, thanks to grainy footage of what seems to be a violent onstage incident, and a warning that Mother Mary’s opening banger “Burial” is a “curse.”

The film finally transitions from the emotional tête-à-tête to the genre piece that was promised, as Sam and Mary discover they’ve seen the same ghost: a horrifyingly red spectral vision. The spirit enters Mary during a birthday seance facilitated by Imogen (FKA twigs), and she can’t shake it.

This gauzy scarlet ghoul and folie a deux between two women calls to mind Peter Strickland’s “In Fabric,” in which Marianne Jean-Baptiste is tormented by a haunted red dress, and Luca Guadagnino’s “Suspiria” remake, filled with twisted modern dance and chest-bursting viscera.

It’s also apt to ponder Lowery’s own “A Ghost Story,” but the most obvious comparison is to Parker Finn’s 2024 pop-possession extravaganza, “Smile 2,” in which Naomi Scott plays a singer invaded by an insidious smile demon. However, “Smile 2” is both gutsier and more coherent than this cerebral and moody picture. Mary’s new single might be called “Spooky Action,” but despite a few gory moments, there’s not all that much spooky action to be found.

Lowery is more concerned with the nature of creative relationships, and the inherent inequality in what it means to make art at this scale; how one can rip out their own bad feelings and not only make something significant but use it as a way to connect with others, shared threads binding souls together.

Naturally, Lowery’s own artistic collaborators are firing on all cylinders. The movie is beautifully crafted, from Andrew Droz Palermo’s lushly surreal cinematography, to the songs by FKA twigs, Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX, supported by a score by Daniel Hart.

It certainly casts a spell, but the aesthetic takes precedence as the narrative devolves into atmospheric mush merely interpolated with many images of Hathaway mugging and posing.

There’s no question about the talent on display. Coel is one of our most hypnotic screen performers, and had Hathaway decided to put her prodigious talents toward pop stardom instead of an Oscar-winning acting career, she’d be one of our top icons. Her Mother Mary performances are so fantastic it leaves you wanting more — of her, but not necessarily this plodding movie.

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'MOTHER MARY'

2 stars (out of 4)

MPA rating: R (for some violent content and language)

Running time: 1:52

How to watch: In theaters April 17

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