They’re Selling You a Dead Dream
And You’re Buying It
So, the trailer dropped. The internet acolytes are lighting their digital prayer candles for Saint A24 and its newest apostle, Anne Hathaway, decked out in a platinum blonde wig that screams “I’m going through something.” It’s for a movie called Mother Mary, a title so self-importantly messianic it makes you want to vomit. They call it a “pop star epic.” An epic. Give me a break. It’s not an epic; it’s a post-mortem. It’s the glossy, beautifully shot, perfectly marketed autopsy of the very idea of independent cinema, and Hathaway is just the celebrity coroner they hired to make the ugly truth look palatable.
Let’s not dance around this. A24, the studio that once felt like a genuine insurrection against the Hollywood machine, has become the machine. They cracked the code. They realized you don’t need to make interesting films, you just need to make films that *feel* interesting, films that can be distilled into a moody GIF set on Tumblr or a 15-second TikTok audio. They sell aesthetics, not stories. They sell a vibe. And the vibe of Mother Mary is the most tired, predictable, and utterly cynical one on the market: the dark side of fame. Wow. Groundbreaking. A pop star, you say? And her life is… complicated? And maybe a little… sinister? Stop the presses. This is the kind of high-concept bravery we haven’t seen since, I don’t know, every single movie or documentary about a female pop star made in the last two decades. It’s a paint-by-numbers script for generating prestige buzz, and it works because the audience has been conditioned to mistake moody lighting for depth and a famous actress in a wig for a compelling character.
The Calculated Career of Anne Hathaway
From Princess to Prestige-Chaser
Don’t get me wrong, Anne Hathaway is a pro. She can act. But her career is a masterclass in brand management, not artistic risk. She was America’s sweetheart in The Princess Diaries. Then she meticulously pivoted to serious, Oscar-bait roles, starving herself for Les Misérables and securing the statue. And now? Now that A24 is the certified stamp of “cool” for actors of a certain age and ambition, here she is, right on cue. It’s a calculated, savvy move to align her brand with the reigning tastemaker of the arthouse-adjacent crowd. This isn’t an artist desperately needing to tell this story. This is a CEO making a smart merger.
The platinum blonde hair is the perfect symbol for this entire hollow exercise. It’s not a transformation; it’s a costume. A lazy signifier for “troubled” or “rebellious.” It’s the ‘90s trend of chunky highlights and dark roots that fashion blogs are calling “polarizing,” but it’s not polarizing at all. It’s safe. It’s a throwback, a comfortable nostalgia play masquerading as an edgy choice. It’s the visual equivalent of a punk rock t-shirt being sold at a Walmart. It gestures at rebellion while being the safest, most commercial thing imaginable. She’s not channeling Courtney Love; she’s channeling a sanitized, focus-grouped memory of what corporate executives think Courtney Love was. The entire project feels like it was conceived in a marketing meeting, not a writer’s room. “We need a vehicle for a major female star. What are the trending traumas? Pop stardom. Perfect. What’s the trending aesthetic? Moody, elevated horror-adjacent drama. That’s A24’s whole deal. Get them on the phone. And get a good wig guy.”
The Director and the Darling
When Mavericks Go Mainstream
And then there’s David Lowery. This is the part that truly stings. The guy who made A Ghost Story, a film so patient, so quiet, so profoundly strange and beautiful that it felt like a transmission from another dimension. The guy who made The Green Knight, a muddy, weird, glorious deconstruction of heroism. He was one of the few genuinely distinct voices out there. And now he’s making a pop star epic? With Anne Hathaway and a score by Charli XCX and Jack Antonoff? Antonoff, the guy who produces for literally every single major pop act on the planet? It feels like a betrayal. It feels like watching your favorite local punk band sign with Capitol Records and start writing power ballads for car commercials. This isn’t a David Lowery film. It’s a David Lowery *product*. A prestige item designed to be consumed by the masses, with just enough of his signature weirdness sprinkled on top to maintain the illusion of authorship. He’s the gourmet chef brought in to design a new burger for McDonald’s. It might be the best burger McDonald’s has ever sold, but it’s still McDonald’s.
And what of Michaela Coel? A true genius. A real-deal, once-in-a-generation artist who created I May Destroy You, one of the most vital, shattering, and formally inventive pieces of television ever made. Her inclusion feels like the project’s most cynical move of all. She’s the credibility chip. She’s the shield they can hold up against accusations of being formulaic or safe. “How can we be generic? We have Michaela Coel!” they’ll say. But what is her role? An estranged fashion designer. It’s a supporting part, a sidekick to the main event, a way to siphon off some of her earned artistic integrity and sprinkle it onto this otherwise conventional-sounding melodrama. I pray she elevates the material, but I fear the material will just swallow her whole, reducing a revolutionary artist to a quirky best friend who dispenses sage advice and wears fabulous outfits. It’s a waste. A goddamn waste.
The Death Rattle of ‘Indie’
It’s Just a Brand Now
This movie, this moment, this perfectly curated trailer—it represents the final gasp of the indie film movement as we knew it. “Indie” used to mean independence. Independence from studio notes, from focus groups, from the need to cast the biggest possible star. It meant freedom to be weird, to be difficult, to fail. Now, “indie” is just a genre. A marketing category. It means a certain kind of digital cinematography, a somber color palette, an elliptical plot, and a general air of serious importance. A24 didn’t invent this, but they perfected it, they packaged it, and they sold it to the masses. They are the Starbucks of independent film; they took something with a specific, local culture and created a consistent, reliable, and ultimately soulless version of it that could be franchised from coast to coast.
Mother Mary is their flagship product for 2026. A pop star epic. A story about the hollowness of celebrity, created by the very system that perpetuates it. A film that will be praised for its “bold visuals” and “brave performances” while saying absolutely nothing new. It will be an exquisitely crafted, beautifully acted, and emotionally resonant piece of content. Content. That’s all it is. It’s not a film, it’s content, designed to fill a slot in a release schedule and a space in the cultural conversation for a few weeks before the next piece of content comes along. It’s sinister and seductive, the trailer tells us. And it’s right. The seduction is in the packaging, the familiar faces, the promise of prestige. The sinister part is that it’s all empty. A beautiful, hollow shell. And we, the audience, are expected to line up, pay our money, and pretend we hear the ocean inside. Don’t. It’s just the sound of a cash register.
