Director: Yorgos Lanthimos
Year Released: 2018
Rating: 2.0
Or, Mean Girls, Circa 18th Century England. Sickly - but sharp - Queen Anne (Olivia Colman), suffering with painful physical symptoms (her legs are bad and she's confined to a wheelchair), has a not-so-platonic relationship with her assistant Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) ... but when Sarah's 'cousin' Abigail (Emma Stone) appears, she tries to 'step in' as Anne's new ... ahem ... close cohort. To his credit, Lanthimos tries 'modernizing' a costume drama with fish-eye lenses and placing his camera at different angles and making it a little tawdry, except the bickering between the three women feels like petty high school-level drama - it's grown women behaving like petulant teenagers, with Anne sleeping with both of them and pitting them against each other. I'm not certain the actual Queen Anne had lesbian tendencies - I'm not a historian - and I couldn't shed the feeling Lanthimos holds all three of his leads with disdain (going the ol' Coen Bros. route): if you don't like your characters, why should anyone else?
