Quick follow-up to something I wrote yesterday: Mother Mary is officially surging on streaming, and I'm not surprised even a little bit. Anne Hathaway's horror oddball has gone from "that movie people were quietly recommending to each other" to "the movie everyone is actually watching," which is a different and much better problem to have.

I called it one of the year's best horror surprises when I first wrote about it, and the viewing public seems to be catching up. There's a particular kind of win I love covering, where a movie that could've disappeared into the algorithm instead gets dragged into the light by pure word of mouth. No billion-dollar opening weekend. No meme-fueled farting evacuation (still my favorite story of the summer). Just people watching something weird, liking it, and telling a friend.

And Mother Mary is weird, in the best way. Hathaway plays it completely off-type, which if you've read anything I've written about her lately you'll know is exactly what I think her superpower is. She refuses to be predictable. One year she's rom-com royalty, the next she's doing something that feels closer to full-tilt genre commitment, and she never winks at the audience while doing it.

The timing is funny, too. While Nolan's The Odyssey is still out there eating the box office alive, the streaming charts are telling a quieter story about the stuff people watch at home on a Tuesday. Those two things can coexist. I've been saying all summer the theatrical experience was rebuilding itself, but the couch has its own economy running in parallel, and Mother Mary just moved up in it.

If you missed my earlier piece: it's on HBO Max, it's better than you're expecting, and you should go in knowing as little as possible. Don't read the synopsis, don't watch a trailer, just press play.

I'll keep an eye on where it lands when the next batch of official numbers comes out. For now, consider this me doing my small part for the word-of-mouth machine. Go watch it, then come back and tell me I'm right. Or wrong. I take both.