Pablo Larrain has made a career out of biopics that refuse to play by biopic rules. Jackie fractured the Kennedy assassination through grief and performance. Spencer turned a Christmas weekend into a psychological horror film. With Maria, the Chilean director completes his trilogy of iconic women by turning to Maria Callas, the most celebrated opera soprano of the twentieth century, and focusing on the final week of her life in 1977 Paris. It’s a bold structural choice that gives the film an elegiac quality from its first frame, but it also means you’re watching a movie about decline, memory, and loss from start to finish.
Angelina Jolie is the obvious draw, and she commits to the role with a seriousness of purpose that transcends the usual celebrity-playing-celebrity dynamic. Jolie reportedly trained for months to perform the vocal work, and while her singing is supplemented by Callas recordings, the physical performance is entirely her own. The way she holds herself, the deliberate control in her gestures, the flashes of imperious authority that punctuate long stretches of fragility, all of it communicates a woman who was always performing, even when the audience was only herself.
Jolie’s Callas Commands Every Frame
The performance is the film’s anchor, and Jolie delivers it with a commitment that borders on transformation. Her Callas is a woman trapped between the person she was, a force of nature who could silence a room with a single note, and the person she has become, alone in an opulent Parisian apartment, haunted by memories and struggling with medication. Jolie makes the transition between these states feel organic, never telegraphing the shift but letting you see it in the set of her jaw or the way her eyes lose focus mid-conversation.
Larrain’s visual sense is, as always, immaculate. The film is shot on a mix of gorgeous color and grainy black-and-white, with the monochrome sequences representing Callas’s memories and fantasy sequences. The Paris of the film is all rain-slicked streets, amber-lit interiors, and grand spaces that feel both luxurious and imprisoning. The cinematography by Edward Lachman creates a world that looks like a fading photograph, beautiful but already disappearing.
The opera sequences are stunning. Whether Callas is performing in memory, in fantasy, or in the occasional flashback to her glory days, Larrain stages these moments with a grandeur that honors the art form without feeling stuffy. He understands that opera is inherently dramatic, and he lets the music do the emotional heavy lifting in scenes where dialogue would only get in the way. The sound design places you inside the music, and the effect is completely transporting.
The supporting performances are strong, particularly Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher as Callas’s devoted household staff, Ferruccio and Bruna. They function as witnesses, caretakers, and emotional tethers, and both actors bring a warmth and concern that grounds the film when it threatens to float away into pure aesthetics.
The Distance That Beautiful Films Sometimes Create
Maria’s primary weakness is a common one for Larrain: the film is so committed to its artistic vision that it sometimes forgets to let you in. The fragmented structure, jumping between past and present, reality and fantasy, memory and hallucination, creates a dreamlike atmosphere that can feel more alienating than immersive. You admire the filmmaking without always feeling connected to the woman at its center.
The screenplay by Steven Knight treats Callas’s relationship with Aristotle Onassis as the central romantic wound, but this subplot never generates the heat it needs. The Onassis scenes feel sketched rather than lived-in, and without a deeper understanding of what that relationship meant to Callas, the film’s emotional arc lacks a solid foundation. You’re told this love defined her, but you’re not shown enough to believe it fully.
The pacing is deliberately slow, and while that suits the film’s elegiac tone, there are stretches in the middle where the combination of fragmented narrative and meditative rhythm tips into tedium. The 124-minute runtime feels longer than it is, and some viewers will find that the film’s beauty becomes a kind of wallpaper, lovely to look at but insufficient to sustain attention.
The fictional framing device, in which Callas is interviewed by an imaginary journalist, is the film’s most divisive element. It’s meant to give Callas a voice and a way to reflect on her life, but it can feel like an artificial construct that distances you from the character rather than bringing you closer. Some of the dialogue in these scenes veers toward the declarative, with Callas explaining her own significance in ways that feel like they belong in a documentary rather than a drama.
Art as Identity, Identity as Prison
The most interesting thread in Maria is its exploration of what happens when a person has so completely merged with their art that losing the ability to perform feels like losing the self. Callas without her voice is Callas without her identity, and the film is at its most powerful when it sits with that terrifying equation. Larrain doesn’t offer comfort or redemption. He simply shows a woman confronting the gap between who she was and who she is, and finding no bridge.
This theme connects Maria to Larrain’s other biographical films in ways that enrich all three. Jackie, Diana, and Callas were all women whose public personas consumed their private selves, and Larrain’s fascination with that dynamic produces his most emotionally resonant material. The film asks whether it’s possible to survive the loss of the thing that made you who you are, and the answer it arrives at is quietly devastating.
Should You Watch Maria?
If you appreciate visually driven, art-house biopics and you’re drawn to Angelina Jolie’s return to prestige drama, Maria is worth your time. The performance is powerful, the cinematography is gorgeous, and the opera sequences alone justify watching. Fans of Larrain’s previous work will find familiar pleasures here.
If you prefer your biographical films to tell clear, emotionally accessible stories, Maria’s fragmented approach and its deliberate pacing will likely test your patience. The film rewards viewers who are willing to meet it on its own terms, but those terms are demanding. If you need narrative momentum or a strong emotional throughline, this may leave you cold despite its obvious craft.
The Verdict on Maria
Maria is a film of extraordinary surfaces and elusive depths. Jolie gives a career-best performance that deserves to be seen, and Larrain’s visual storytelling remains among the most distinctive in contemporary cinema. But the film’s commitment to atmosphere over intimacy means that the emotional impact doesn’t always match the technical achievement. It’s a beautiful, melancholy film about a beautiful, melancholy subject, and for some audiences that will be more than enough. For others, the distance it maintains will feel like a missed opportunity to transform admiration into something closer to love.