Anne Hathaway’s A24 Film “Mother Mary” Finds Streaming Audience After Box Office Struggles

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Anne Hathaway is having a busy 2026. She returned to fashion’s most cutthroat workplace alongside Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada 2 and starred in Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. She also moved into erotic thriller territory with Verity and led the dinosaur thriller The End of Oak Street. Few Hollywood leading women have a lineup this heavy on blockbusters.

One of her most intriguing performances this year came in a stranger, more challenging movie that didn’t set the box office on fire. The A24 film is now finding a new audience on streaming.

Mother Mary, director David Lowery’s unconventional psychological thriller, is climbing the HBO Max movie charts after a theatrical run that generated little commercial momentum. According to FlixPatrol, the film ranks among the platform’s top-performing movies. Audiences seem to be giving it a second look.

What is Mother Mary about?

Hathaway plays a troubled pop superstar. The film mixes psychological drama, supernatural horror and a look at the complicated relationships behind artistic success. It is a considerably stranger proposition than Hathaway’s more mainstream releases.

Mother Mary is a globally famous singer on the verge of a comeback performance. She is in an emotional crisis, so she turns to Sam Anselm, her former best friend and costume designer. The two haven’t seen each other in years. Michaela Coel (I May Destroy You, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) plays Sam. Mary needs a new dress for her return to the stage, but the reunion quickly becomes a reckoning with the painful history of their creative partnership.

As the two women confront their unresolved feelings, the film turns increasingly supernatural. A ghostly presence haunts them both, appearing as a writhing mass of red fabric. An intimate confrontation between estranged collaborators gradually becomes something closer to an exorcism.

The supporting cast includes Hunter Schafer (Euphoria, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes), model Kaia Gerber (Bottoms), Jessica Brown Findlay (Downton Abbey, Brave New World) and FKA twigs (The Crow, Honey Boy). Lowery brings the same atmospheric, unconventional approach that marked his earlier films, including A Ghost Story and The Green Knight.

Mother Mary divided audiences, but it holds a 69% critics’ score and a 60% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. That makes it a better-rated experiment than its disappointing box office suggests.