A barn inside a German castle built the world: The filming locations of Mother Mary

The most important location in Mother Mary is not a concert stage. It is a barn inside a moated castle in the hills of Wachtberg, North Rhine-Westphalia.

When Mother Mary asks Sam to make her a dress for an unforgettable performance, the pair embark on an intense evening of confrontation and reinvention in Sam's sombre workspace — a dark barn on an estate that appears to be somewhere in the English countryside. In reality, it is the stable at Burg Adendorf. UK-based production designer Francesca Di Mottola was explicit about what the barn meant to the film: "The stable is a container where the story unfolds and where the emotions are held."

The structure became not only a leading character in the film but a critical cinematic device connecting every environment the story inhabits. The barn's rustic wood beams are echoed through the lighting design of Mother Mary's concert stage and through a 360-degree mirrored dressing room. For a backstage scene, Di Mottola recreated the wood beams as the backdrop for Mother Mary's journey to her first séance — led by FKA Twigs — in a hotel room. The design team laid the same wood plank flooring they put over the barn's dirt ground in front of the hotel room set to connect the two spaces thematically. Some sets were built inside the barn itself, including Sam's bedroom where she first encounters the supernatural.

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The exteriors of Sam's home were filmed at a different German castle — Burg Müddersheim in Vettweiss, a municipality in the Düren district of North Rhine-Westphalia. Where Burg Adendorf provides the interior world of the story, Burg Müddersheim gives Sam's house its exterior face.

The concert scenes were filmed at Kunst!Rasen — the open-air venue on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn, set within the grounds of a former industrial site. The stage design, built on the Kunst!Rasen ground, incorporated the wood beam motif that Di Mottola had established at Burg Adendorf — the barn's aesthetic travelling into the concert arena as connecting tissue. The arena sequences were supplemented by a soundstage shoot for controlled performance scenes.

The concert scenes were also filmed in London's Hyde Park, with 400 extras watching as Hathaway performed as Mother Mary on stage. "I did everything I could to give them a genuine experience — it was amazing to receive their energy back," Hathaway told A24.