Matthew Shepherd on 2019’s Serenity…
There is a very specific kind of Hollywood film that defies all logic. Not a film that was always destined to fail — a cheap production with no names attached, quietly shelved and forgotten — but one that arrives with every conceivable advantage and still manages to vanish without trace. Serenity, the 2019 neo-noir from Steven Knight, is perhaps the most extreme example of this happening in recent memory. Two Oscar-winning leads. An acclaimed director at the peak of his powers. A supporting cast stacked with serious talent. Yet somehow barely anyone has heard of it, and fewer have even seen it. And those who have are still confused about what they watched.
On the surface, the premise is straightforward enough to work. Matthew McConaughey plays Baker Dill, a fishing boat captain living a quiet, idyllically sunny life on the fictional Plymouth Island. His simple life is disrupted when his ex-wife Karen, played by Anne Hathaway, turns up out of nowhere with a proposition: kill her wealthy, abusive new husband Frank (Jason Clarke) by pushing him off a boat during a fishing trip, and walk away with ten million dollars. It reads like a classic noir setup. Femme fatale, morally compromised protagonist, money, violence, all taking place in a beautiful location.
However, what makes Serenity’s disappearance so remarkable is who was involved. This was McConaughey and Hathaway’s first and only pairing since Interstellar, Christopher Nolan’s 2014 sci-fi blockbuster that grossed nearly $700 million worldwide. Their reunion should have been an event in cinema. Knight, meanwhile, was riding as high as any British director in living memory — Peaky Blinders had made him a prestige television god, and his 2013 feature Locke, a film set almost entirely inside a car with Tom Hardy, had demonstrated he could do serious cinematic work without needing a large budget. The rest of the cast included Diane Lane, Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou, and Jeremy Strong — all well-known powerhouse actors, with the latter then on the cusp of the Succession-era fame that would make him one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation. Every element pointed toward a sure fire hit and something worth watching.
The film was shot entirely in Mauritius, becoming the first full-length Hollywood feature to do so. The choice sounds eccentric but did have practical logic behind it: the production needed calm, shallow water for extensive boat sequences, and Mauritius’s reef system effectively created a natural tank that eliminated the cost of studio alternatives. The island also offered a generous production rebate, helping stretch the film’s budget. Knight wanted a location that felt like it could be the Caribbean, Africa, or anywhere in between. The problem is that shooting equipment had to be shipped from South Africa, most of the crew came from elsewhere, and the result was a logistically complex production that added difficulty without adding much visible value on screen.
The strangest part of this film though is the marketing, or should I saw lack of. Distributor Aviron Pictures initially committed to a wide release campaign. Then the test screenings came back, and everything changed. Aviron quietly pulled the marketing budget and released the film with minimal promotional support. McConaughey and Hathaway were reportedly furious — they had signed on with the expectation of a proper campaign, not a January dump. Aviron’s own statement admitted they had tested and retested the film, found the data unsupportive, and adjusted accordingly. The film cost $25 million and made roughly $8.5 million worldwide. That is not underperformance. That is a near-total collapse in a pre-COVID era when audiences were actively going to cinemas to see all types of movies.
The reason Aviron panicked becomes clear, and somewhat justified, the moment you see the film’s third act. Serenity reveals — with no meaningful preparation — that Plymouth Island is not a real place. It is a video game. Baker Dill is a character coded by his own son Patrick, a traumatised teenager who lost his real father in the Iraq War and built a fishing simulator as a way to stay connected to his memory. This probably sounds farfetched on its own, and yet still manages to get weirder. When Patrick’s home life deteriorates from his stepfather’s abuse, he reprograms the game to include a murder. Jeremy Strong’s bizarre subplot — a mysterious suited businessman who keeps trying to sell Baker a fish finder and keeps showing up at inexplicable hours — is explained by this revelation: he is a glitch in the code, an entity representing the game’s rules trying to maintain the simulation’s initial integrity. In retrospect, every strange, slightly-off moment in the first two thirds is intentional. At the time, it just feels like bad writing.
It’s hard to know whether Serenity’s twist is either an audacious swing at simulation theory as emotional metaphor or one of the most misjudged structural decisions in recent blockbuster filmmaking. The truth is probably somewhere in-between. What it unquestionably is though, is unmatchable by any marketing team. How do you sell a simple, noir thriller when the third act turns it into a Black Mirror episode? The answer – you don’t. You quietly reduce the campaign and pray the damage is minimised.
Both McConaughey and Hathaway received Razzie nominations for their performances. The criticism is understandable in isolation — the dialogue is often stilted, the tone bizarre — but makes more sense once you understand that Knight was directing them to perform as video game characters experiencing distortion in their own code. Whether that defence holds up to the viewer though is another matter.
Years later, with the dust settled, what Serenity leaves behind is a genuinely unusual question. Did everyone involved know what they were signing up for? Hathaway, in a press junket post, described it as “thrilling, ambitious, violent, spiritual, erotic, charged, dark, damning, contradictory, maddening, lushly intelligent.” That is either a remarkable piece of promotional loyalty or a genuine defence of a film she believed and had confidence in. Either way, it sadly did not help. Serenity came out in January 2019 and was then gone by February. It is the kind of film that makes you wonder whether the industry’s mechanisms to quietly dispose of a film are a flaw or a feature of the business.
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Matthew Shepherd
