Maria
Directed by Pablo Larrain
Written by Steven Knight
Starring Angelina Jolie
Released November 27th, 2024
Published December 4th, 2025
In the early 2000s I coined a flippant, dismissive new term for typically young adult movies that featured young, attractive people dying of the disease of being too pretty and full of promise. I dubbed these movies ‘Dead Ingenue Movies.’ The term was mostly inspired by Mandy Moore’s soporific starring vehicle A Walk to Remember, from 2002. But there were other, similar movies from the early 2000s that mined the same dimwitted tropes to craft a tear jerking narrative about young women whose value to the world was to reform a ne'er do well male protagonist before dying from being too attractive and young.
In the last few years however, director Pablo Larrain has single handedly transformed the dead ingenue sub-gene by combining the trope-heavy, too-perfect-to-live teen weeper with a splashy, toney biopic of a famous dead ingenue. In 2016 Larrain trained his eye on Jackie Kennedy to capture the vulnerable side of the first lady in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of her husband, President John F. Kennedy. Then, in 2021, Larrain turned his camera’s eye to, perhaps, the most famous dead ingenue of all, Princess Diana, in Spencer.
Find my full length review at Geeks.Media, linked here.
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