Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Kayleigh Donaldson | Film | July 24, 2026
Anne Hathaway fans don’t know how to lose. Now vindicated after years of a nonsense Hathahate campaign everyone has mercifully moved on from, she’s having one of the busiest and most successful years of her already-storied career. The Devil Wears Prada 2 gave her a major box office hit. Mother Mary offered her one of her most intriguing roles to date. The Odyssey is, well, epic. And she’s not even close to done. The End of Oak Street will see her chase off dinosaurs and then she’ll inevitably elevate the terrible source material of the Colleen Hoover novel Verity. Not that I need an excuse for it, but hey, since it’s the Summer of Annie, we’ve got an opportunity to revisit one of her more criminally underseen films: a quirky rom-com starring Peter Dinklage that features nuns, opera, tugboat captains, and Civil War reenactments!
Written and directed by Rebecca Miller, She Came to Me stars Dinklage as Steven, an opera composer who has a very New York rom-com life. He’s married to Patricia (played by Hathaway), a psychiatrist who has a very clinical approach to her husband’s many neuroses. You see, he’s struggling to find inspiration for his next opera, even though he’s told a ton of people that progress is going great and it’ll all be finished soon. Patricia sends him out on a walk with their dog to find some inspiration, and in a bar, he meets Katrina (Marisa Tomei.) She’s a tugboat captain, and after inviting her to her vessel, where she both works and lives, she admits that she’s addicted to love (and stalking) and seduces Steven. He runs away but now has the plot for his next opera, with an added serial killer subplot. It’s a hit, but then Katrina turns up at the premiere and says she’s going to stick around for a while.
If that all sounds weird and jumbled, it’s because the movie is, indeed, kind of weird and jumbled. And that’s not all! She Came to Me also delves into another romance with Patricia’s son, Julian, and Tereza, the daughter of their cleaner, Magdalena (Joanna Kulig from Cold War). Tereza’s racist stepdad Trey (Brian D’Arcy James) does not approve and threatens Julian with arrest for statutory rape, a charge the lovers decide to stave off by getting married. This whole section feels like it came from a different script that Miller melded with the A-plot, but there is connective tissue between the narratives. Miller is fascinated by control and how love, when it’s done right, completely destroys it. Trying to be sensible about romance is both boring and unhelpful. It makes fools of us all, if you’re lucky.
Hathaway’s a great comedic actress. We’ve known that since her days as the Princess of Genovia. It defined her to many long before she showed her dramatic chops (I still remember being kind of stunned as a teenager, watching Brokeback Mountain and thinking, “Wait, that’s Mia Thermopolis?!”) She has a wonderful screwball-like looseness that makes her perfect for the genre. Here, she’s the straight woman, at least at first, so buttoned up and authoritative that her husband has to sheepishly request if they can have sex. “Ooh,” she replies, forever in therapist mode. “That’s an interesting idea.” It’s the same demeanour she has with her patients, who include the ever-underrated comic Chris Gethard. She’s a clean freak who thinks everyone and everything can be scrubbed into submission, but it takes very little for her to come apart, which she does in spectacular and absurd fashion.
She Came to Me also gives us a depressing rarity in cinema: romantic hero Peter Dinklage. Not enough people saw Cyrano and even fewer people saw this, dammit! As confusing and confused as She Came To Me is, it fundamentally understands that Dinklage is hot as hell and that he’s especially charming as a befuddled artist torn between women who are far smarter and crazier than he is. In a more interesting world, he’d be headlining Whit Stillman films (or Woody Allen ones in the timeline where he’s not, you know, Woody Allen.)
I can’t claim for a minute that everything in She Came to Me works. It really is a mish-mash of ideas and tones that feels like at least three movies competing for our attention. It’s drenched in irony and deeply arch, maybe a touch too self-consciously so. But I’m a sucker for a film that’s trying to do way too much over not having enough ideas or mood to sustain itself, and She Came to Me is crammed to the lid with Miller’s thoughts on the intersections of love and creativity. We’ve been told so many times that making art is meant to be a psychologically agonizing process. You’re meant to put yourself through the wringer and expose your rawest emotions to a hungry audience. What a nightmare. For Steven, having a quiet life with a sensible wife and lovely home is Kryptonite to his process, which only exposes the sad truth that he might not be that great an artist if this is all it takes to hobble him. Imagine your happy ending being the one where you choose inevitable danger and heartache because it helps your writing.
She Came to Me is all about how mining real life as your sole source of artistic fuel is silly and comes with a short shelf life. Sure, you could choose the stalker tugboat captain over your therapist but how long will that last before you run out of opera ideas and need to find an even more unhinged muse? How much crazier can you go after that?
