Between the grief-soaked cosmic drift of “A Ghost Story” and the mythic head trip of “The Green Knight,” David Lowery spent the last decade turning genre movies into existential mood pieces. With “Mother Mary,” his long-rumored pop melodrama for A24 starring Anne Hathaway and Michaela Coel, that sensibility finally collided with stadium anthems, fashion houses, and full-blown diva spectacle — and now it finally had a date and a trailer.
After years of rumor and test-screening chatter, A24 unveiled a trio of stark character posters stamped “In theaters April” and quietly locked the film in for a theatrical release in April 2026, and now the long-awaited first look trailer has arrived. Long described as an “epic pop melodrama,” “Mother Mary” followed the relationship between a fictional music superstar and the designer who turned her into a myth, with Hathaway as the pop icon and Coel as the legendary fashion architect who knew exactly how the image was built — and how it could fall apart.
The supporting cast stacked the deck even further. Hunter Schafer, Jessica Brown Findlay, Sian Clifford, and FKA Twigs rounded out the ensemble, while composer Daniel Hart’s score wrapped itself around original songs by Jack Antonoff and Charli XCX and FKA Twigs. On paper alone, it looked like Lowery’s most maximalist collision of pop, faith, and melancholy to date.
The campaign hinged on a single, slightly taunting line: “This is not a ghost story. This is not a love story.” Coming from the filmmaker who once literally put a guy under a sheet in “A Ghost Story” and then detoured into Disney with “Pete’s Dragon” and “Peter Pan & Wendy,” the tagline played like a preemptive correction — don’t expect a haunted romance, don’t expect a straightforward pop biopic, and maybe don’t expect anything conventional at all.
Production had already hinted at how far everyone pushed it. Shot in Germany under an interim SAG-AFTRA agreement, the film wrapped with Hathaway calling the shoot one of the most intense, transformative experiences of her career. Lowery described the movie in interviews as “a weird, weird film,” the kind of project he knew would provoke strong reactions in “every possible direction,” and there were stories about at least one climactic sequence that left Hathaway emotionally wrecked between takes.
The trailer itself was still under wraps, but the shape of the film no longer felt hypothetical: a surreal pop-star melodrama from one of A24’s house auteurs, fronted by Hathaway and Coel, powered by Antonoff/Charli XCX songs, and branded with a tagline insisting it was neither a ghost story nor a traditional love story. After years in TBA limbo, “Mother Mary” suddenly looked like one of 2026’s strangest, most personal swings — the kind of movie that started haunting people before a single frame hit the internet.
