Melania

The palette of her wardrobe is almost entirely black and white, and that simplicity is easily echoed. You may be tempted to seek out Melania in its brief cinematic run. Don't.

It is dull. We follow, or are at least stage managed around, just under three weeks before the inauguration of her husband as the 47th President of the United States. Though one quarter under two hours you will feel each of those 20 passing. It's not real time, indeed the falseness of everything is about the only reason to keep watching. Like the swirl of static on a cathode ray television, the longer one stares at the black and white, the more one starts to hallucinate meaning.

Did I lose count of the outfit changes? I might have. I got to around two-dozen but there could have been repeats. I think I got the 18 motorcades. The various locations boil down to Trump Tower, the Capitol, the East Wing and the Oval Office, and Mar-A-Lago. We spend a lot of time moving between them but for all the back and forth we go nowhere.

It is ostensibly directed by Brett Ratner, but the level of control exerted by his subject(s) is such that questions of authorship are at least as complicated as why it's been more than a decade since Ratner helmed a picture. I was minded of other directors. The use of The Rolling Stones' Gimme Shelter is a hallmark of Scorsese's depictions of criminal enterprises, appearing in The Departed, Casino, and Goodfellas. That might be coincidence; so too the presence of The Crystals' Then He Kissed Me from the tale of Henry Hill. Except it opens the film, an elevated shot looking down at the tennis courts and golf courses of Florida's winter White House.

Recycling soundtrack is one thing, but there's also a bit of Moroder's score for Midnight Express and Morricone's for Casualties Of War. What does it mean? Maybe nothing. Say it again.

It should have a strobe warning. It's got a BBFC one, won in part from references in the lyrics of some of those songs. That's not a warning that Twenty Feet From Stardom has but this is as proximate to something captivating but with much, much, less to say.

There are job interviews. There's a job title of Executive Producer To The President For Major Events. The list of those, in order of appearance, has the biggest name 13th. There are scenes that appear to have been filtered (if not shot) on home cine-cameras, but it's not clear whether that's to pretend to the Camelot of the Kennedies or find in texture an authenticity that gloss and artifice cannot paper over.

There are dinners, one of which is to thank donors for making it possible. I paraphrase, but only in tense. We'll see Jeff Bezos, whose Amazon produced this, there are a few scenes with Elon Musk, a brief glance of Mark Zuckerberg whose own story is both more and less false than this.

There aren't any revelations. Events have passed this by already. It was released a year after the events it depicts. Four screens of sentences are not reward enough for what audiences will have sat through. In almost every version of Spider-man we get a retread of his origin but at least that's a story. It'd be more productive to chase one's own tail. Doggedly, the crews follow from fitting to outing to meeting. Things happen.

I kept looking for meaning. At times I wondered if it was as if I were sitting through Triumph Of The Will searching for hints of either sincerity or sarcasm. When discussing "one continuous theme" of "white and gold" it's hard not to look at the folk and furnishings.

Tony Nieman's score is outweighed by music that MGM's large archive may have already licensed. It's got the whiff of daytime TV, but that's me being unkind as it's overshadowed by grander designs. When Elvis launches into American Trilogy, the balance between Dixie and the Battle Hymn Of The Republic is as uncomfortable as remembering that Arlington National Cemetery was confiscated from Robert E Lee, that the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that seizure wouldn't stand, that his descendants sold it back, that it was Lincoln's son that signed the paperwork. That weight, and waiting for it to be remarked upon, reminded me of Civil War and A House Of Dynamite. It said less than the first, less than the second.

The definition of performative covers both words that do something, like the Declaration of Independence, and words that do not. Is this a documentary? It records events. There is a metatextual moment where we see a staffer respond to a request for a conversation about how the documentary came to be. "These Hollywood people," they say, with their golden wallpaper and their views of Central Park. Their Macbooks perched on brushed aluminium elevated further by coffee table books with themselves as subject. Labels everywhere, and not a sign to be seen.

Other than this: stay away. This will cost you more than the price of a ticket, two hours or so of your life. I can't speak to the moral of the story. There's perhaps neither of them here. It has been outpaced by events, it offers nothing new over the news. You can watch it, but there's nothing to see.

Reviewed on: 03 Feb 2026