The knives were already out, but no one expectedThe Guardianto twist quite so hard.Melania Trump's long-awaited documentary,Melania,has been downgraded to a rare, almost ceremonial humiliation: zero stars. Not one. Not even a token nod to effort. For a film reportedly costing Amazon $75 million—including $40 million funnelled directly to the former First Lady's own production company—it's the cinematic equivalent of being booed off the red carpet.
Critic Xan Brooks didn't mince words. In hisblistering review, he branded the project 'a gilded trash remake' of Jonathan Glazer'sThe Zone of Interest—an accusation that manages to be both surreal and brutally concise. Brooks wrote that watchingMelaniais like enduring 'two hours of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch,' before delivering the death blow: 'Two hours ofMelaniafeels like pure, endless hell.'
It's a line so sharp you can imagine it appearing on DVD sleeves in a long, ironic afterlife.
The New Yorker'sLauren Collins took a different approach—half bewilderment, half fascination. She likened the documentary to 'an OnlyFans account crossed with that meme of Kim Jong Un visiting factories,' a cultural comparison so precise it almost counts as mercy. What do you do, she asked, with a subject 'whose feet are more expressive than her personality?'
Director Brett Ratner, best known for noisy action comedies likeRush Hour, seems to have traded explosions for boredom. Collins described the production as 'glamorous to the point of paralysis,' a film that successfully replicates Melania's own aesthetic: 'rigid, formal, solitary—surrounded by flunkies conscripted into the closest thing to intimacy she can manage.'
Over atDeadline,Pete Hammond delivered the showbiz equivalent of a mercy killing: 'I watchedMelaniaso you don't have to,' he wrote. The problem, according to Hammond, wasn't the propaganda so much as the punishing tedium. 'It commits the cardinal sin of being simply, brutally boring.' His particular resentment? Sitting through 'the inauguration again in eye-drooping detail.'
It's not just thatMelaniafails to move; it refuses even to try. What might have been a portrait of quiet mystique becomes instead a museum installation about wealth and vacancy. The only drama emerges in watching how meticulously nothing happens.
Much of the ridicule stems from sheer disbelief at the budget. Amazon apparently spent $75 million to deliver a film that, according toVariety'sDaniel D'Addario, is 'primarily about a woman walking into and out of rooms—nothing more.' He called the work 'aggressively uninterested' in its subject's inner life, a strange indictment given that the subject is also the producer.
Nick Hilton atThe Independentwas equally savage, dubbingMelania'a scowling void of pure nothingness in this ghastly bit of propaganda.' For him, the film sits uneasily 'between reality TV and fiction,' without the energy of either. AndEmpire'sWilliam Thomas, known for diplomatic understatement, couldn't resist a pun. This wasn'tTriumph of the Will,he wrote—it wasTriumph of the Shill, 'political propaganda at its most transparent, cynical, and very, very boring.'
Add one final nail fromThe Irish Timescritic Donald Clarke—'Never have I encountered a film so devoid of irony or self-awareness'—and you have what may go down as one of the most universally hated documentaries of recent years.
Source: International Business Times UK
