At Sundance ’13 (13 years ago) I became a David Lowery devotee after catching Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, a descendant of Robert Altman‘s Thieves Like Us…basically a film about young love, guns, outlaws, rural flavor.
Three years later I got off the Lowery bus after totally hating Pete’s Dragon — a bone-headed, nonsensical, friendly dragon film, from Lowery and Disney and costarring Robert Redford.
But during Sundance ’17 I fell head over heels for Lowery’s minimalist Ghost Story (silent, watchful ghost under a plain bedsheet).
In ’18 came Lowery’s decent, modestly approvable Old Man & The Gun (Redford as gentleman bank robber).
And then in 2021 Lowery’s horrific The Green Knight, a sodden medieval dreamscape thing, arrived…a trippy, bizarre, hallucinatory quicksand movie that moves like a snail and will make you weep with frustration and perhaps even lead to pondering (not my idea but the film’s) the idea of your own decapitation.
After The Green Knight I said to myself, “okay, that’s it…Lowery is clearly Satan, a banshee, a vile goblin.”
From Owen Gleiberman’s review of Mother Mary:
“This is the David Lowery-est David Lowery movie ever made. Which is to say that by the end of it, you may be scratching your head to the point of wanting your money back.
“Mother Mary dances on the barn floorboards, and Sam says things like ‘You give people the gift of giving a shit about you.’ But what the movie really comes down to is a séance. And the stabbing of flesh. And a ghost.
“Yes, a ghost. In the form of a floating piece of red material that looks like a blanket made of organza. Is this the ghost of their relationship? Or a real ghost? That’s a question that will be debated by moviegoers for maybe four seconds. Because Mother Mary, as it takes the leap into Gothic metaphysical fantasy, becomes almost completely incoherent, and stays that way. It’s like an exorcist movie where the devil is a piece of bolt fabric.
“Mother Mary eventually turns into the most befuddlingly pretentious movie about a pop star since Brady Corbet’s Vox Lux. It heads down a blind alley of cosmic meaning that, in the end, means nothing.”
From HE’s July 2021 review of Lowery’s The Green Knight:
“I will never forget The Green Knight, and I will never, ever watch it again. It’s an exacting, carefully crafted, ‘first-rate’ creation by a director of serious merit, and I was moaning and writhing all through it. I can’t believe I watched the whole thing, but I toughed it out and that — in my eyes, at least — is worth serious man points.
“What would I rather do, I was asking myself — watch the rest of The Green Knight or bend over and allow my head to be cut off? Both would be terrible things to endure, I reasoned, but at least decapitation would be quick and then I’d be at peace. Watching The Green Knight for 130 minutes, on the other hand…”