The Custom Mary (2011)
Searching for purpose and meaning in the world, a young Latina in East Los Angeles becomes dangerously involved with a storefront church where a young minister enthralls her. At the same time, she meets Joe, a self-empowered African-American low-rider mechanic. Mary, struggling to reconcile her faith and her blossoming love affair with Joe, is pulled into a group from the church who believes they can clone Jesus, with Mary's help.
rating 6/10 User rating 1 votes 20% ❄ Christmas Connection
The Custom Mary is a modern retelling of the Nativity story, transposed into the lowrider culture of East Los Angeles. A young Latina named Mary is chosen to carry a cloned Jesus, and the film's entire theological premise rests on the Christmas origin story. It's the Nativity as indie drama, not as pageant.
Our Review
Nobody told East LA it couldn't host the Nativity. The Custom Mary, written and directed by Matt Dunnerstick and distributed in the United States in 2013, transplants the story of the Virgin Mary into the lowrider culture of East Los Angeles, drops in a storefront church, a cloning experiment, and an African-American mechanic named Joe, and dares you to call it sacrilegious. The result is the kind of film that wins Best Cutting Edge Film and Best Religious Topic at the same festival, simultaneously, which is exactly what happened at the 2013 San Diego Black Film Festival.
That double win is not a contradiction. It's the whole point.
The Nativity in a Lowrider City
The premise is this: two preachers and a scientist discover what they believe to be drops of Christ's blood. They use it to attempt a cloning, selecting a young Latina named Mary as the vessel. Mary, played by Alicia Sixtos, is simultaneously falling for Joe, an independent African-American mechanic. Faith, science, love, and fanaticism all collide at once.
Dunnerstick studied creative writing at the University of Cincinnati before making this his feature debut, and his script earns its ambition. The Nativity parallel is not subtle, but the film earns the comparison by grounding it in specific, lived-in detail. Lowrider culture is not a prop here. The hydraulics, the paint work, the street festivals, the community hierarchy of the scene -- these form the actual texture of Mary's world, and they make her situation feel urgent rather than allegorical.
The storefront church is handled with equal specificity. Its charismatic minister is not a cartoon villain. He genuinely believes. The film is smart enough to understand that faith and manipulation can coexist in the same room without either canceling out the other.
Alicia Sixtos Carries It
Sixtos was born in San Francisco in 1988 and moved to Los Angeles at age 14 to pursue acting. The Custom Mary was among her early features, and it shows why she went on to lead the Emmy-nominated Hulu series East Los High in 2012. Her Mary is not passive. She pushes back. She questions the church elders. She makes choices that cost her something. That's harder to play than it looks, particularly when the script asks her to hold the emotional weight of a Nativity metaphor without letting it crush the character underneath.
James Jolly as Joe handles the Joseph parallel with enough restraint that the allegory never feels forced. The film is smarter when it lets the parallels surface organically than when it nudges the audience toward them.
The Cast Around the Margins
The Custom Mary assembled a striking supporting cast for an independent feature. Bill McKinney, the veteran character actor best known as the backwoods mountain man in Deliverance and as a recurring presence in seven Clint Eastwood films including The Outlaw Josey Wales, appears as The Silent Boss. McKinney died on December 1, 2011, from esophageal cancer at age 80, making The Custom Mary one of his final screen appearances.
Eileen Dietz, whose face served as the demon in The Exorcist in 1973, plays Mary's mother. Putting The Exorcist's demon face in a film about religious cloning and the Nativity is either deeply intentional or the greatest accidental casting decision in low-budget cinema. Either way, it works.
Janina Gavankar, who would go on to star in The Morning Show and Star Wars: Battlefront II, appears as Ms. Rime. The Custom Mary predates her wider recognition by nearly a decade.
A Christmas Movie Without Christmas Decoration
The Custom Mary is not a Christmas movie in the traditional sense. There are no Christmas trees, no carols, no gift-wrapping scenes. It earns its place in the Christmas canon the way the Nativity itself does: through its subject matter rather than its seasonal trappings. The entire film is, structurally, a retelling of the story that Christmas commemorates. Mary. Joseph. The divine pregnancy. The faith required to believe something impossible. The community that either supports or threatens that belief.
The film does not end triumphantly. The cloning fails. You cannot clone the Spirit, as the film puts it. The failure is the point. The original story worked not because of science but because of faith, and no amount of genetic material can replicate that. It's a theological argument delivered via a 2011 indie drama about East LA lowriders, and the fact that it lands is the most surprising thing about this film.
The Custom Mary premiered at the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival in 2011 and picked up eight festival awards before its 2013 digital distribution through GoDigital. It never got a wide theatrical release. A film this specific in its cultural setting and this unusual in its theological framework was probably always going to live on the indie circuit. Its 7.5 rating on IMDb, built from a small but committed audience, suggests that the people who found it recognized what it was doing.
Fun Facts
The Custom Mary won both Best Cutting Edge Film and Best Religious Topic Film at the 2013 San Diego Black Film Festival, one of the country's largest Black film festivals -- two categories that seem designed to exclude each other.
Bill McKinney, who plays The Silent Boss, appeared in seven Clint Eastwood films and is best known for the backwoods assault scene in Deliverance (1972). He died on December 1, 2011, at age 80, making The Custom Mary among his last screen appearances.
Eileen Dietz, who plays Mary's mother, served as the face of the demon Pazuzu in The Exorcist (1973), doubling for Linda Blair in several key shots. She later wrote a memoir titled "Exorcising My Demons: An Actress' Journey to the Exorcist and Beyond."
Alicia Sixtos, who plays Mary, was born in San Francisco in 1988 and moved to Los Angeles at age 14 with her sisters to pursue entertainment careers. She later starred in the Emmy-nominated Hulu original series East Los High (2013).
Janina Gavankar, who has a supporting role as Ms. Rime, went on to be a main cast member of The Morning Show on Apple TV+ and provided the voice and motion capture for Iden Versio in the 2017 game Star Wars Battlefront II.
Director Matt Dunnerstick studied creative writing at the University of Cincinnati before making The Custom Mary his first feature film. The production won eight festival awards across its circuit run.
The film premiered at the HBO New York International Latino Film Festival in 2011 and was distributed digitally in the US by GoDigital in 2013, with the company releasing under the title "Karen" in some international markets.
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