Maria

Pablo Larraín's Maria completes the loose trilogy of biographies of twentieth-century women begun with Jackie (2016) and Spencer (2021). Like its predecessors, the film is not a conventional cradle-to-grave account but a distillation — a single compressed episode through which an entire life becomes legible. Produced by Lorenzo Mieli and Juan de Dios Larraín, and financed through a partnership involving Fandango, Komplizen Film and Netflix, Maria had its world premiere in competition at the 81st Venice Film Festival in September 2024, where Edward Lachman's cinematography drew particular attention, subsequently earning him an Academy Award nomination.

Angelina Jolie plays Callas in the final days of her Paris exile: medication-dependent, selectively reclusive, revisiting a life already half-mythologised. Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher play her faithful household staff; Haluk Bilginer appears as Aristotle Onassis in her memories; Kodi Smit-McPhee is a phantasmatic journalist she grants an imagined interview. Lachman shoots in a palette that ranges from the cold blue-grey of the Paris apartment to the warmer, more golden register of Mediterranean recollection. Steven Knight's screenplay constructs the narrative as a series of recursive returns, with Callas's past and present bleeding together in a way that echoes Larraín's formal interests across the trilogy.

Critical response centred on Jolie's physically and vocally committed performance, widely regarded as a career-defining turn. The film opened in select US theatres in November 2024 before streaming globally on Netflix in December. It arrived as the most commercially visible entry in Larraín's filmography to date, positioning him firmly within the tradition of European directors who have engaged with twentieth-century feminine iconography as a subject for formal investigation rather than hagiography.