Why Mother Mary Is the A24 Event Worth Preparing For
David Lowery doesn't make movies in a hurry. His films breathe, linger, and ask you to meet them halfway — which is exactly what makes Mother Mary feel like the A24 event of the spring. Arriving in wide release on April 24, 2026, the R-rated psychodrama stars Anne Hathaway as a Lady Gaga-like pop icon reuniting with her estranged best friend and former costume designer Sam Anselm, played by Michaela Coel, on the eve of a comeback performance. Hunter Schafer rounds out a cast that, on paper alone, sounds like the most electric collaboration A24 has assembled in years.
Early critical framing suggests this is not the crowd-pleaser some might expect from that logline. IndieWire has described the film as a singular, hypnotic psychodrama about long-buried wounds rising to the surface between a diva and the person who knew her before the persona — a two-hander that trades spectacle for simmering dread and intimate scar tissue.
If you're walking into that theater cold, you're going to feel the frequency shift. Lowery works in a register that A24 has quietly cultivated for over a decade — the one that didn't get the Everything Everywhere All at Once awards run but has arguably produced the studio's most lasting work. The best preparation for Mother Mary isn't a trailer rewatch. It's a deep dive into A24's underseen catalog: the movies about fame, fractured creative partnerships, and spiritual dread that taught the studio how to make something like this in the first place.
What follows is a guided tour through seven underrated A24 movies, grouped by what they share with Mother Mary's DNA.
The Fame-and-Persona Pictures
Mother Mary lives or dies on a single idea: the gap between who a famous person is on stage and who they are when the lights die. Three A24 films have mined that same gap with unusual patience.
The End of the Tour
James Ponsoldt's 2015 two-hander between David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel) and Rolling Stone reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) is the purest thematic cousin to Mother Mary in the A24 catalog. It's a film about a famous artist letting a near-stranger close enough to see the seams, and then regretting it in real time. The stakes are conversation, not concert, but the emotional architecture — the performance of honesty, the wary choreography of intimacy — is the exact terrain Hathaway and Coel will be navigating.
Red Rocket
Sean Baker's sunburnt 2021 portrait of a washed-up porn star returning to his small Texas hometown is the other side of the same coin. Where Mother Mary will likely examine fame at its apex, Red Rocket is about the long, humiliating tail of a persona that has already expired. Simon Rex's performance is one of the most fearless in A24's history, and the film's moral queasiness — its refusal to let you feel good about the protagonist — is exactly the kind of risk Lowery seems to be courting.
Under the Silver Lake
David Robert Mitchell's 2018 Los Angeles conspiracy reverie is the wild card here, and the one most worth rediscovering. It's a film about the rotted mythology beneath celebrity culture — what happens when you pull too hard on the thread and realize the whole sweater was a con. It flopped on release. It has aged into something close to a cult classic. If Mother Mary is operating, even partially, as a film about what fame does to the soul, Under the Silver Lake is the dissertation.
Each of these films asks the same question in a different dialect: what happens when a public-facing persona collides with the private person underneath? More persona-driven work lives in the drama movies hub if you want to keep pulling the thread.
Fractured Creative Partnerships
The Hathaway-Coel dynamic in Mother Mary — singer and costume designer, closest friends turned estranged collaborators — is the engine of the film. A24 has quietly built a small library of movies about the way creative intimacy can curdle.
The Farewell
Lulu Wang's 2019 film isn't about a creative partnership in the traditional sense, but it is about the emotional labor of a performance — a family staging a fake wedding to hide a cancer diagnosis from their matriarch. Awkwafina's Billi is forced to play a role she doesn't believe in, for people she loves. The result is a quiet devastation about the performances we give to the people closest to us, which is exactly the kind of terrain Mother Mary seems to be mapping.
Showing Up
Kelly Reichardt's 2022 sculptor-and-landlord comedy is maybe the most underseen film about artistic friction A24 has ever released. Michelle Williams plays an artist preparing for a show while her friend, rival, and landlord (Hong Chau) absorbs all the oxygen in the room. It's a film about how collaboration and competition are often the same gesture seen from different angles — and it's essential prep for a movie about a pop star and the designer who helped build her.
20th Century Women
Mike Mills' 2016 ensemble about the women who shape a teenage boy in 1979 Santa Barbara doesn't look like a Mother Mary companion piece on paper. But the ache of it — the way Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, and Elle Fanning's characters keep revising their relationships to one another in real time — is the same intergenerational frequency Lowery tuned into with A Ghost Story. Collaboration here is a form of slow, unspoken love, which is precisely the kind of bond Mother Mary seems poised to excavate.
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Roll the DiceThe Dread Shelf: A24's Spiritual Horror You May Have Skipped
Mother Mary's title is not a coincidence. Hathaway's character carries the name of a saint, and Lowery's filmography has always had a mythic, almost liturgical quality. These three underseen horror entries are the closest A24 has come to that register.
Saint Maud
Rose Glass's 2019 debut about a hospice nurse in the grip of religious mania is, full stop, the most overlooked horror debut A24 has ever released. Morfydd Clark's performance is terrifying not because Maud is unhinged but because her faith is real — the movie refuses to condescend to her visions. If Mother Mary is operating in a key of sacred intensity, Saint Maud is the tuning fork.
The Killing of a Sacred Deer
Yorgos Lanthimos at his most clinically menacing. The 2017 film gets namechecked on every underrated list and still somehow feels under-watched, maybe because it's so unpleasant that nobody wants to be the person who recommended it. But its interest in ritual punishment, in debts that must be paid regardless of fairness, is the exact mythic undercurrent Lowery has worked with before.
Lamb
Valdimar Jóhannsson's 2021 Icelandic folk-horror oddity is the kind of international A24 import that got lost in the shuffle — a slow, strange, deeply melancholy film about grief, surrogacy, and the things the land remembers. It's the closest A24 has come to the mythic patience that defined A Ghost Story, and it's essential if you want to calibrate yourself for whatever Lowery is cooking up.
Browse the broader horror movies catalog for more A24-adjacent mood pieces.
Two Wild Cards Worth the Detour
Waves
Trey Edward Shults' 2019 two-act emotional gut-punch is the film critics loved and audiences somehow let slip by. The first half is a pressure cooker; the second half is a long exhale. Kelvin Harrison Jr. and Taylor Russell give performances that rearrange your ribs. It's a film about the aftermath of a catastrophe the camera refuses to sensationalize — which, based on early reactions, sounds like the mode Mother Mary is working in.
Val
The 2021 documentary assembled from Val Kilmer's decades of personal home footage is a devastating meditation on performance and mortality. Kilmer narrates through a voice box after throat cancer; his son Jack reads his written words. The film plays beautifully against Mother Mary's comeback-concert framing, because it's about what it costs to be watched for a living — and what happens when the instrument fails.
Both films sit in the 2020s movies sweet spot of A24's catalog and reward viewers who want something outside the genre lanes above.
How to Actually Watch These Before April 24
These titles are scattered across different streamers, rental platforms, and the occasional disc — which is exactly the problem RandomFlix is built to solve. If you want to hand the decision off, the Roll the Dice button will pick one for you.
A suggested viewing order:
- Week one — the fame-and-persona trio. The End of the Tour, Red Rocket, Under the Silver Lake. You're tuning your ear to the register of celebrity in crisis.
- Week two — the creative partnerships. The Farewell, Showing Up, 20th Century Women. You're learning how A24 stages intimacy that has started to fester.
- The week of release — the dread shelf. Saint Maud, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lamb. You're preparing for mythic, sacred, sometimes ugly intensity.
- The wild cards, whenever. Waves and Val slot in wherever you have a free evening.
What to Expect When Mother Mary Finally Drops
Lowery's filmography — from the 40-minute pie-eating grief trance of A Ghost Story to the medieval slow cinema of The Green Knight — suggests Mother Mary will lean hypnotic rather than plot-driven. Do not expect a conventional backstage melodrama. Expect long takes, weighted silences, and a film that asks you to sit with discomfort instead of being told how to feel about it.
The R rating is doing real work here, given Lowery's history of lingering on the body, on the face, on the thing most directors would cut away from. And the April 24, 2026 wide release means this isn't going to be one of those A24 titles buried in four theaters — it's getting a genuine swing.
A24's back catalog is the best trailer the studio could offer for what Lowery is about to do. These seven underseen films are the homework — the quiet, weirder, more emotionally feral work that will make Mother Mary land with the weight it deserves. Start with The End of the Tour tonight and work your way down.