Anne Hathaway's Best 2026 Performance Is Now Streaming on HBO Max

Even by the ambitious standards of a career that has spanned prestige drama, blockbuster spectacle, and everything in between, 2026 has been a remarkable year for Anne Hathaway. Yet the performance most deserving of careful attention wasn't one of her high-profile tentpole appearances — it was a quieter, stranger, more daring piece of work that slipped through theaters with little fanfare and is only now finding its audience on HBO Max.

A Year of Blockbusters With One Crucial Outlier

Hathaway's 2026 slate reads like a producer's fever dream: a major sequel, a supporting role in Christopher Nolan's latest epic, and a dinosaur film that critics have called the most inventive entry in that genre since Spielberg defined it in the early nineties. She has appeared prominently across The Odyssey press circuit and its New York premiere red carpets, by all accounts a fixture of the season's biggest movie events. But threaded between those commercial commitments was something far more idiosyncratic: Mother Mary, a psychological thriller from director David Lowery that opened in April and, for most audiences, disappeared just as quickly.

Who Is David Lowery, and Why Does This Film Matter?

For those unfamiliar with Lowery's body of work, his filmography is a study in tonal and generic restlessness — from the Arthurian reverie of The Green Knight to the meditative, temporally fractured A Ghost Story, the filmmaker consistently resists the pull of conventional storytelling in favor of something more elliptical and experiential. His signature touches — in-camera effects, non-linear editing, a deep preference for mood over exposition — are present throughout Mother Mary, which according to Polygon represents perhaps his most formally audacious effort to date.

The premise is deceptively contained. Mary (Hathaway), a global pop star on the edge of an emotional collapse, surfaces unannounced in London on the doorstep of Sam Anselm (Michaela Coel), her former costume designer, closest friend, and implied ex-lover. A comeback concert looms. Old wounds surface. Mary asks Sam to create a dress for the performance, and the two women fall reluctantly back into a creative relationship that is equal parts generative and destructive.

A Ghost Story in Disguise

For long stretches, the film operates almost like a stage play — two formidable actors trading charged dialogue inside the vast, fabric-draped space of Sam's workshop. But Lowery punctuates this chamber drama with flashback sequences and concert footage that allow Hathaway to demonstrate the particular exhaustion of public performance: the seamless mask of magnetism maintained onstage, the raw, undefended person revealed only when the professional scaffolding falls away.

Beneath its character study surface, Mother Mary is, as Lowery himself has acknowledged, fundamentally a ghost story. A supernatural presence — rendered in striking, morphing shades of red — moves between the two women, manifesting Sam's grief at being left behind by a creative partner and eventually haunting Mary herself. Lowery collaborated with artist Daniel Wurtzel, known for his work suspending fabric in air, to give the ghost its distinctive visual character. The result is imagery that resists easy symbolic decoding, functioning simultaneously as horror, metaphor, and something more elusive.

Hathaway in a Different Register

What makes Mother Mary essential viewing, beyond Lowery's craft, is precisely how different Hathaway is here compared to her headline-generating blockbuster work. The performance is interior, layered, and at times deeply uncomfortable — a portrait of a woman whose professional identity has calcified over years into a kind of armor she no longer knows how to remove. Opposite Coel, whose own performance carries enormous weight in every withheld reaction, Hathaway does some of the most nuanced work of her career.

For audiences who caught HBO Max's recent programming additions and want something more substantive than a comfort rewatch, Mother Mary is exactly the kind of film the streaming era tends to bury and then quietly rediscover. It deserves the second look.