The most anticipated A24 film of the spring has a secret collaborator who does not appear in the credits.
Her name is Taylor Swift, and according to director David Lowery, she shaped the movie from the inside out, from the way the concert sequences were shot, to the budget decisions made in pre-production, to the DNA of the lead character herself.
Mother Mary opens in limited US release on April 17, 2026, and goes wide on April 24. It stars Anne Hathaway as a tormented pop icon, Michaela Coel as her estranged former costume designer, and features original music from Charli XCX, Jack Antonoff, and FKA twigs.
Before any of that music was recorded or any of those sequences were filmed, Lowery was sitting in a room with his creative team watching Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour concert film on repeat.
“Her Reputation concert film is one of the best concert films ever,” Lowery told Empire in an interview published April 7, 2026. “It’s truly phenomenal. And for our concert sequences we looked at that repeatedly. You would not believe the amount of time we were talking about Taylor.”
How Swift’s Reputation Tour Became A Production Blueprint
The practical dimension of Swift’s influence on Mother Mary is more specific than inspiration usually gets.
Lowery and his team did not simply watch the Reputation concert film for mood or aesthetic reference. They used it as a technical and financial tool.
The challenge was fundamental. How do you film a convincing stadium pop concert on an independent film budget?
Mother Mary is an A24 production, which means it operates with considerably less money than a major studio picture, and a stadium concert is one of the most expensive things to recreate in film.
The stage design, the lighting rigs, the visual effects, the crowd. None of that is cheap.
Lowery’s solution was to take three specific numbers from Reputation and break them down shot by shot.
For each shot in each sequence, the team asked what it would cost to replicate in visual effects. They built a cost model from that exercise and used it to plan their own concert sequences.
“We used that as a budgeting tool, because we didn’t know how to wrap our heads around actually pulling off a stadium concert-show on a minimal budget,” Lowery said. “We were literally using Reputation as a guide. I can go on about Reputation all day.”
The Reputation Stadium Tour ran from May to November 2018 and grossed $345.7 million worldwide.
The Netflix concert film, released on New Year’s Eve 2018, was markedly different from Swift’s other tours in tone, darker, more theatrical, built around snake imagery, black bodysuits, and pyrotechnics.
If you were going to pick a Taylor Swift concert to model a psychological drama-thriller on, Reputation is the obvious choice.
It is the one where she was deliberately portraying a version of herself that had been destroyed and rebuilt, performing with the theatrical menace of someone who had decided to lean entirely into the persona her critics had created for her.
For a film about a pop star unraveling and seeking to reinvent herself, that specific template makes complete sense.
The Character Was Written With Swift In Mind
The budget application is significant. But the deeper revelation is what Lowery said about Anne Hathaway’s character, Mother Mary, the fictional pop icon at the center of the film, and where she came from.
He wrote her with Swift in mind. Not as a direct portrayal, not as a roman à clef, but as a thought experiment about where someone like Taylor Swift might find herself in a decade or more from now.
“I definitely brought a lot of Taylor Swift to the table in terms of who Mother Mary was,” Lowery said. “I would often be like, ‘Imagine Taylor Swift in 10 or 15 years, that’s sort of who this character could be.'”
The character had previously been described in early coverage as a Lady Gaga meets Taylor Swift hybrid, a major pop star of enormous cultural presence who flees her own tour in the middle of an existential crisis, then seeks out a former creative collaborator whose relationship with her is defined by buried betrayal and long-suppressed resentment.
The psychosexual dynamic that develops between Mary and Sam, played by Coel with what early reports suggest is devastating intensity, is the engine of the film. The stadium spectacle is the exterior.
The relationship is where the film lives.
Writing that character with Taylor Swift as the reference point is a specific creative choice that tells you something about what Lowery was going for.
Swift occupies a particular position in contemporary pop culture that is almost impossible to occupy without it becoming a kind of mythology, the constant reinvention, the public scrutiny of every relationship and friendship, the way her persona is simultaneously constructed and authentic, the fan devotion that borders on religious, the commercial scale that dwarfs almost every other artist alive.
Mother Mary lives in that territory. She is a woman whose public image has consumed her private self, and who cannot tell any longer where the performance ends.
Hathaway’s Swift-inspired Production Wrap Gift
There is a coda to all of this that seals just how deep the Swift immersion went on set.
When production on Mother Mary finished, Hathaway gave Lowery a wrap gift. It was a beaded friendship bracelet, in the style that became ubiquitous during the Eras Tour, when fans traded bracelets outside arenas across the world.
The bracelet spelled out “Anti-Hero,” the lead single from Swift’s 2022 album Midnights and one of the biggest pop songs of the decade.
Lowery also confirmed that both he and Hathaway attended the Eras Tour in Europe while the film was in production, they were at the Germany show in July 2024, where Hathaway was spotted in the VIP section trading bracelets and singing along.
The film and Swift’s world were not just conceptually adjacent. The people making it were physically present in the crowd.
What Is Mother Mary?
The film opens with an iconic pop star, Mother Mary, played by Hathaway, who cancels her tour mid-run in the grip of an emotional and creative rupture.
On the eve of a planned comeback, she seeks out Sam Anselm, a fashion designer and former best friend from whom she has been estranged.
What draws them back together is material and symbolic simultaneously.
Mary needs a dress for the new tour, and Sam is the person whose creative eye helped build the image Mary still carries.
The reunion forces open wounds that have been closed for years. The story that follows is described as a psychosexual affair, two women locked in a relationship of genuine love and genuine resentment, circling questions of authorship, exploitation, and control.
The on-set intensity of the material was notable. Lowery told one story about a particular scene where Hathaway came to him beforehand and said, “I have to apologise, because I think what’s going to come out of me will hurt you.”
Coel took Hathaway’s hands and said, “I love you, I trust you.” Lowery described being in that emotional register for approximately a week while shooting that sequence. This is not a light film.
The supporting cast includes Hunter Schafer as Coel’s assistant Hilda, FKA twigs in an acting role alongside contributing original music, and Kaia Gerber, Sian Clifford, Jessica Brown Findlay, and Alba Baptista in supporting parts.
The music was created by people who understand exactly what pop at this level actually sounds like and costs, Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff together represent a significant portion of the most commercially successful and critically respected pop production of the past several years.
The soundtrack album, Mother Mary: Greatest Hits, releases April 17. Lead single “Burial,” written by Charli XCX and performed by Hathaway, has been out since March.
Who Is David Lowery?
David Lowery is 45 years old and has built one of the more interesting filmographies in American cinema without settling into a single genre or register.
He made a quiet Texas crime film in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a genuinely haunting ghost story in A Ghost Story, a Disney live-action remake in Pete’s Dragon, and then one of the strangest and most beautiful fantasy films in recent memory with The Green Knight.
He directed episodes of Star Wars: Skeleton Crew between features.
His career resists easy description and that quality, the sense that he goes wherever the material leads without a formula for what his films should feel like, is exactly what an A24 pop star psychological thriller about obsession and betrayal requires.
He watched Reputation repeatedly. He broke it down shot by shot. He wrote a character by imagining Taylor Swift a decade from now.
He received a friendship bracelet that spelled “Anti-Hero” when the cameras stopped rolling.
Mother Mary opens April 17 in limited US release and April 24 in the UK.
