Like David Lowery’s 2017 film “A Ghost Story,” his new film, “Mother Mary,” is a tale of a haunting that’s set mainly in a single location. With “A Ghost Story,” it was one house in Texas; in “Mother Mary,” it’s a fashion designer’s studio in rural England. The titular character (Anne Hathaway) is a pop star who’s been on hiatus and who, three days before her comeback concert, barges into the compound of her estranged costume designer, Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), and demands a new dress for the occasion. Mother Mary (which is the character’s stage name; her actual name goes unspoken) had, as it turns out, stopped working with Sam years ago and teamed up with other designers. During that interregnum, Mary endured personal calamity. Now, reuniting with Sam, she brings a volatile blend of contrition and arrogance, wheedling and insistence.

“Mother Mary” is a chamber piece of sorts. Most of the movie involves the two women’s dialogue-heavy wrangling over the terms of their relationship, present and past—what Mary wants from Sam and what Sam demands in return, what they had and how Mary broke it. The nature of their bond also lends the movie its metaphysical dimension. Avoiding spoilers, let’s say that the two women share a ghost, though Sam at first believes that it’s hers alone and considers Mary’s claim on the spirit to be yet another example of the singer’s starcissism. The script, written by Lowery, is filled with aphoristic barbs, especially from Sam. She calls the singer a “carcinogen,” “a tumor,” “a malignancy” and says that “love and hate are bound” before adding, “you deserve neither.” She asks Mary to describe her emotions, which will inform the costume designs—Sam calls her own art of fashion the “transubstantiation of feeling”—and when Mary chides her for digging deeply the designer explains, “I need to see what I’m meant to cover.” Coel endows each of these lines with balletic verbal artistry; the women may speak in equal measure, but it’s Sam’s voice that shapes and sharpens the dialectical action.

In “A Ghost Story,” Lowery relied on the cliché of a white sheet with black eyeholes to incarnate, with bittersweet wit, the presence of a disembodied spirit. The ghost in “Mother Mary” is similarly fabricated, pun intended: it takes the form of a piece of lavish, blood-red chiffon that spirals and contorts in the air. Among the few scenes that take place outside of the studio are flashbacks involving the ghost. One involves a séance for Mary held by a mysterious interloper named Imogen (FKA Twigs), whose revelations send the singer into self-harming conniptions. Unfortunately, these supernatural tales drop into the story as conveniences rather than as spiritual experiences. (There’s no sense whatsoever that the religious implications of the singer’s stage name connect with her offstage life.) The scenes of ghostly encounters symbolize the longtime collaborators’ deep bond and difficult separation—Sam’s pained effort to detach herself from the friend who’d spurned her, Mary’s agonized isolation from the friend she’d spurned—but they end up replacing any substantive discussion that the two women might have had about their breakup. The script’s blank spots and evasions leave the drama feeling unfulfilled and unsatisfying. At one point, Sam asks Mary outright why she went to another designer. Mary responds, “I told you I needed a change,” but she has just about nothing to say about her costumes, her performance, her way of life. She describes a new song with the cringey boast that it “might be the best song ever written in the history of songs.”

Another set of flashbacks, showing Mother Mary performing onstage, doesn’t help from a dramatic perspective, and it does the character no favors. Hathaway is among the more rational and self-aware of current actors, with a manner that suggests both the ability to see a step ahead and the prudence not to flaunt it. (She reminds me, in this regard, of the classic-Hollywood actress Myrna Loy.) Thoughtful discipline may avert reckless performances, but it can also make the portrayal of heedless characters seem effortful. What takes place onstage in “Mother Mary” often comes across as mechanical, methodical, learned rather than lived-in, not solely because of the character’s stage manner or the actor’s temperament but because of the gaps in Lowery’s script. The actual work, the passion and the tension, of being a pop star—the writing of songs, the rehearsals, the fittings, the stagings, the workouts, the tie-ins, the choreography, the contracts, the lawyers, the money—are nowhere to be found. The behind-the-scenes passion is missing, too. The scenes of live performance show that Mother Mary is a star but don’t show why she’s a star, because Lowery, who is often among the most expressively compositional of filmmakers, films them generically, as if averaging visual tropes from concert films. Even the most active scene at the studio—of Mary dancing for Sam as she’ll do in concert—is oddly chopped up. Unlike the graceful ghost and the haunted humans in “A Ghost Story,” Hathaway is given little time or space to move.

“Mother Mary” is exemplary of troubling trends in the current cinema. As a so-called two-hander that’s also mainly a one-setter, it’s essentially a filmed play—and not one teeming with a well-meshed ensemble but a sharply delimited one, akin to such other recent small-scale films as “Peter Hujar’s Day,” “Send Help,” “Daddio,” “His Three Daughters,” “Malcolm & Marie,” and even Steven Soderbergh’s “The Christophers,” among his many films of the past decade to take a localized approach. The prevalence of this format reflects a fundamental crisis in realistic, character-driven cinema, as filmmakers try to navigate two conflicting commercial demands: to cast celebrities and to keep budgets low. A big chunk of the production money in such movies may go to paying the stars and providing their customary working conditions, leaving much less for the filmmaking itself; this forces directors to rely on a narrow scope of sets and locations, few (if any) supporting actors, and relatively spare action. The challenge then becomes how to evoke a wide world on a small scale.

It can be done. Ira Sachs’s “Peter Hujar’s Day,” starring Ben Whishaw and Rebecca Hall, is based on a real-life document—a recorded discussion, from 1974, between the acclaimed photographer Hujar and the writer Linda Rosenkrantz, that was later published as a book. Sachs stages the characters’ dialogue mainly inside an apartment, but the subjects they broach and the stories that emerge conjure the characters’ experiences in the outside world with a visually evocative force more powerful than actual flashbacks. By contrast, most other recent two-hand-one-setters suggest a resigned effort to make whatever film is possible in a commercially narrowed environment.

This sense of constraint reverberates through “Mother Mary,” and “A Ghost Story” again provides a revealing point of comparison. The 2017 film also had a starry cast (Rooney Mara and Casey Affleck, who were also friends of Lowery’s). It was made for a little more than a hundred thousand dollars, put up by Lowery himself and three friends. As Lowery put it, “No one got paid.” However unsustainable as a business model, those conditions gave rise to passionate work, and the collective fervor of cast and crew is reflected in the film’s thrillingly intense images. “Mother Mary,” by contrast, seems to want it both ways: it’s a small-scale movie of a manufactured sumptuousness, flaunting Hollywood-standard production values on its few sets. The film was shot in Germany, with a big crew, and even just the cost of transportation and lodging for the team must have been more than the whole budget of “A Ghost Story.” But the result feels like a Hollywood production done on the cheap, with strenuous efforts to mask its small scale. The handful of concert scenes are more a matter of showy display than dramatic import, and the many images of the two protagonists talking appear to strive not even for expression but for mere visual variety. That sense of strain makes the movie come off as a cry for help on behalf of the entire independent filmmaking community as it faces contradictory commercial demands.

In a sense, Mother Mary goes to Sam as Lowery went to his friends to make “A Ghost Story,” not with an arm’s-length business deal but on the basis of friendship. The fraught bond at the center of “Mother Mary” suggests that Lowery keenly discerns the personal conflicts of professional relationships, the dependence and independence that artmaking entails, the need and the pressure of collaboration, the breakups and the reunions, the behind-the-scenes clashes from which movies emerge. Lowery, as director, asks people to work for him on a project that he signs as auteur; at the same time, he’s also, in effect, dressing his stars, doing whatever he can to help them shine in the spotlight. (He has excelled at this in the past, as in “The Old Man & the Gun,” his 2018 film, in which Robert Redford is glorious in a starring role which turned out to be his last.) But there’s little in “Mother Mary” to suggest anything of the experience of stardom or, for that matter, of directing. As for the experience of dealing with stars, “Mother Mary” offers little but the sense of their great neediness and self-centeredness, as if that were news. The very casting of its stars comes across as the film’s main story instead of the one onscreen.

The most frustrating moment in the movie arrives when Sam, in her studio, helps relieve Mary of the ghost by way of a homemade exorcism, complete with chalk circle, candles, and a pentagram. A stickpin is also involved, and Mary pricks her finger with it. To continue the rite, Sam then takes the same pin and pricks her own finger. This is not the mutual intermingling ritual of blood-sisters; only Sam introduces Mary’s blood into her own. As a metaphor for assistantship and subordination, the image is strong. But it also has racialized implications that the movie leaves entirely unexplored—an omission that’s all the more glaring given that the character of Imogen, the séance-holder, is yet another Black assistant for Mary. The failure to acknowledge that a Black woman taking in a white woman’s blood would have any dramatic significance, not least to the characters themselves, suggests just how little of his own film Lowery seems to see. ♦