The release of Mother Mary — A24’s psychodrama starring Anne Hathaway as a fictional global pop superstar — has reignited a pointed debate about Hollywood’s chronic inability to make the music world feel real on screen, with critics arguing that a new wave of prestige pop-star films consistently sacrifices credibility for brooding pretension.
Director David Lowery’s film, which enters wide release this weekend, features Hathaway as a global pop icon so emotionally fragile that audiences are left waiting, in the words of one critic, for a reveal that the whole story is set in a mental institution. Lowery said his team used Taylor Swift’s Reputation concert film as a reference point — yet the finished film contains minimal performance footage, pivoting instead into body horror and the supernatural.
The film positions Hathaway’s character as a riff on Lady Gaga — maximalist dance pop, an extravagant postmodern wardrobe, an air of transgressive Catholic rapture — and reunites her with estranged fashion designer Sam Anselm, played by Michaela Coel, on the eve of a comeback concert. Critics broadly agree that Coel outshines the material, with one reviewer noting she was reportedly involved from the screenwriting phase and that her performance surpasses even her acclaimed recent work elsewhere.
The music itself draws sharp criticism. The score was written by Charli xcx, Jack Antonoff, and FKA Twigs — top-tier pop architects — yet Variety’s Owen Gleiberman described the result as sounding like “Taylor Swift trying to be Enya.” The film’s title character announces she has written what might be “the best song ever written in the history of songs” — then the movie ends before anyone hears it.
This pattern runs through a broader cluster of recent pop-set films, including Hurry Up Tomorrow with The Weeknd, The Moment with Charli xcx, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest, and M. Night Shyamalan’s Trap. Nearly all frame themselves as psychological thrillers and collapse the music industry into two or three characters, stripping away managers, labels, producers, and the entire scaffolding of real pop stardom.
Two films stand out as partial exceptions. Power Ballad, starring Paul Rudd and Nick Jonas, opens June 5 and earns praise for grounding itself across the career spectrum — one character fronts a wedding band, the other rebuilds a solo career. And The Ballad of Wallis Island, a British comedy with Carey Mulligan and Tom Basden as an estranged folk-rock duo, works precisely because it portrays musicians whose songs are strong but not world-changing — a quieter, more believable ambition.
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The Broadway play Stereophonic — a three-hour drama set almost entirely inside a recording studio, drawing on Fleetwood Mac lore — has demonstrated that audiences will sit with an authentic portrayal of music-making when the writing is sharp enough. Film has yet to replicate that.
