“You get it.”

That’s the message I got a couple of months ago from D. J. Caruso, the acclaimed director of 2007’s Disturbia, and of the new Netflix film Mary. I had heard that Caruso was doing a movie about Mary, and sent him a piece I wrote earlier this year about the mother of Jesus being relatable to me—something like “a 1980s New Wave teenager.” The point of my piece was that the Mary, apart from being the Mother of God, had been a real teenaged Jewish girl who, like other teenaged girls I had known, probably liked music, her family, her community, and had lived with a sense of humor. I compared her to Lisa, a Jewish friend of mine from my clubbing days in the 1980s. I noted that I often speak to Mary in my normal conversational voice rather than in official prayers. In my way, and as a Catholic, I was offering praise for the Blessed Mother.

According to Caruso, the piece showed that I “got it.” I now get why he thinks I got it.

Mary is beautiful, gorgeously shot, and expertly acted film that shows how the Mother of God was human while never diminishing her unique role in the history of the world. It should be seen by everyone. As Caruso told me in a recent interview, “Just because you’re making a faith-based movie doesn’t mean that cinematically it shouldn’t take you to another level.” By making Mary seem real, as well as presenting her story with gorgeous cinematography and sets, Mary does just that. With its fantastic sets, earthy locations shots, and flesh-and-blood actors, Caruso gives a sense of what it must have been like to be alive at the time of Christ. It’s a thrilling movie experience.

The plot is well-known. Two thousand years ago, during the time of the Roman Empire, Jews were second-class citizens who were required to pay homage to King Herod. There is tension which is brought to a boil due to the ancient prophecies of the birth of the messiah, a King of the Jews, who will overthrow the old order. Mary, “like any cinematic movie hero,” as Caruso puts it, must suffer and struggle and persevere “to do great things.” When God calls you it’s not easy: “You have to fight for it. There is going to be great cost.”

“I wanted the audience to experience it from her perspective,” Caruso told me. “In a lot of movies, and many are wonderful, there’s this distance between you and the Virgin Mary or Joseph or Christ. But what would it be like on Earth at that time?”

Caruso says that Mary did not have a huge budget, and so he is proud of how gorgeous the film looks. He noted the works of cinematographer Gavin Struthers and cites the great director Terrence Malick as an inspiration. Caruso also noted that Morocco, where a lot of the film was shot, offers natural special effects. “Malick has been a big inspiration, just watching. What he does, how he shoots.” Caruso says. “In Morocco, the wind is natural. Whenever we’d be shooting a scene this beautiful gust or this zephyr would come through. it was really, really magical.”  

Mary has also drawn criticism. The first came from leftists and some Muslims, who are enraged that an Israeli Jew, Noa Cohen, plays the title character. One critic argued that the film should have been shot in Bethlehem. Yet the Palestinian Authority, which controls the town, did not give their permission—and given Israeli citizens like Noa Cohen are not permitted in Bethlehem. Several critics have claimed that Mary and Jesus were Palestinian. In the gospel of Luke, Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, the wife of the priest Zechariah and mother of John the Baptist. This is faithfully portrayed in the film. Luke 1:5 says that Elizabeth is a descendant of Moses’s brother Aaron of the Tribe of Levi. If Mary is a blood relative, then she, too, must be Jewish. Upon entering their home Mary goes on to make a proclamation commonly referred to as “Mary’s Song” in which she thanks God for helping “his servant Israel, remembering to be merciful to Abraham and his descendants forever, just as he promised our ancestors.”

Other objections to the film come from some quarters of Catholicism. These critics suggest that since Mary was free of original sin, she should not have been depicted experiencing pain during childbirth, as happens in Mary. This is a point over which good people on both sides of the question can debate. Much sillier is the outage some express that Mary’s husband, Joseph, (well played in the film by Ido Tako) shows romantic interest in her, and that Mary experiences moments of doubt about her calling. Of course Joseph had romantic—which is not the same thing as sexual—thoughts about Mary. That’s not sinful. One critic even erupted over the film “doubting Mary’s virginity.” I watched it twice and never saw one instance of that. Quite the opposite, in fact.

For Caruso, politics wasn’t a factor in creating this film but finding the right actor was. “I thought, I have to find the right girl. I have to find the right Mary. Then I found this incredible audition. I just saw Noa and it just hit me: Oh my God, that’s her. She has this beauty and this grace and she’s from about an hour of where Mary was born. It isn’t a political statement or any other statement.”

Caruso also observes that Cohen is an athlete in real life. I offer that this athleticism comes across in the movie. Mary is not aggressive, of course, but she is also not the passive WASP icon, eyes lifted heavenward, that has been decoded in popular art for centuries. She has a quiet power and authority, even reminding a Jewish leader that he needs to step up and lead his community. The rest of the cast is first-rate. Anthony Hopkins as King Herod is particularly captivating, as the veteran actor intensely conveys Herod’s mix of psychopathology and his fear of a messiah being born.

The larger theme, of course, is what Caruso calls “standing up to the mob and accepting suffering in order to do great things.” I mention that there is a parallel between Mary’s time and ours—we still have a state that seems to want to claim that it is God and oppresses those who claim otherwise.

“When you dive into the scenes and the dynamic and behaviors you see the parallels to the 20^th century,” Caruso says. “What Mary did takes great courage. Once you accept this gift, God into your heart, it’s not going to be easy.” This is shown when an angry mob threatens to stone Mary, claiming that she has dishonored Joseph by bearing the child of another man. The angry mobs are like the ones you often saw on the streets of 2020s America, screaming for blood on behalf of their own political causes. It’s noteworthy that Joseph, who is silent in Scripture, is dramatized as actively protecting Mary and rejects the hateful words of her accusers. “We wanted to give Joseph a voice as someone who can stand up to the mob,” Caruso says. 

Poetically shot directed with intelligence and inspiration, exciting and spiritually profound, Mary is what religious conservatives have been begging to see again since the time of The Passion of the Christ: a masterfully done faith-based movie. See it.