“Mother Mary” Brings Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway to HBO Max

Michaela Coel and Anne Hathaway in A24’s “Mother Mary,” streaming on HBO Max August 21. PowerPage branding added.

“Mother Mary” reaches HBO Max today, August 21, giving A24’s pop-star psychodrama a new audience after its theatrical run. Anne Hathaway plays Mother Mary, a world-famous performer preparing for a comeback, while Michaela Coel plays Sam Anselm, the former friend and costume designer she left behind. Their reunion begins with a professional request and quickly reopens a relationship built from ambition, intimacy, betrayal, and unfinished emotional business.

Warner Bros. Discovery’s official August schedule confirms the streaming date, and A24’s film page establishes the creative core: David Lowery wrote and directed the feature, with Hathaway and Coel leading a cast that also includes Hunter Schafer, FKA twigs, Kaia Gerber, Jessica Brown Findlay, Alba Baptista, Sian Clifford, and others. That lineup places musicians, actors, and fashion-world energy inside the same deliberately heightened frame.

The film’s premise is especially suited to PowerPage because the music is not just decoration. Mother Mary’s comeback performance is the pressure chamber around the story. Stardom becomes a kind of armor; clothing becomes both image-making and confrontation. Sam is not simply asked to make a dress. She is pulled back into the machinery that elevated Mother Mary while damaging the friendship that helped build it.

https://youtu.be/ATGaqU6Srcc

Coel gives the film its most grounded counterweight. Her performance keeps Sam from becoming a backstage accessory to a fictional pop icon. The designer has her own history, creative authority, and reasons to resist the reunion. Hathaway, meanwhile, leans into the physical and emotional performance of celebrity: the controlled gestures, the rehearsal discipline, and the fear underneath a public image designed to look untouchable.

That tension helps explain why “Mother Mary” fits better as a streaming recommendation than a simple celebrity headline. It asks viewers to watch the labor behind spectacle and the personal cost of a comeback. The film can move from melodrama to psychological unease without offering the comfortable rhythm of a conventional music biopic. It is less interested in chart milestones than in what a performer and her collaborators sacrifice to create the illusion of inevitability.

Viewers following PowerPage’s recent streaming coverage will recognize the service-value angle: the material development is availability. The film is now accessible through an HBO Max subscription rather than only its earlier theatrical and transactional windows. HBO Max lists the debut for August 21; viewers should confirm the title is available in their account region before starting.

For audiences drawn to Michaela Coel, fashion, original pop-world storytelling, or A24’s more experimental films, “Mother Mary” is the strongest film-and-streaming addition to today’s Afternoon Edition. The official A24 trailer provides the clearest preview without giving away the film’s turns. The movie is available now on HBO Max.