There was a moment during the Dua Lipa concert I went to a few months ago where the pop star got on a small platform that hoisted her up higher and higher as she performed a ballad from her newest album. I couldn’t get lost in the song’s emotional sweep because I kept worrying that Lipa, teetering in high heels and bundled in ankle-length furs, was going to accidentally trip off her precarious-looking roost. Would a glamorously impractical item of clothing or a simple misstep be responsible? 

It’s probably silly to fret about anything like that happening during a rehearsed-to-death arena show, much less one put on by someone so breezily meticulous in life and art that it’s come to obstruct one’s emotional connection with her. David Lowery’s new Mother Mary, in the meantime, exists in an alternate reality where pop stars could feasibly take that sort of stomach-dropping plunge, though that’s partly because it’s been engineered precisely for a film-defining visual: A silhouette of the aftermath where you couldn’t distinguish a safety harness’s thick cord from a noose. In this stylized, tenebrous movie written and directed by a self-professed Swiftie, pop stardom kills, spiritually in the near-term and literally in the long-. 

Read the full review at South Sound.

Image courtesy of A24