Melania Trump Film Savaged by Critics as 'Gilded Trash' Remake With Zero Stars

The knives were already out, but no one expected The Guardian to 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 his blistering review, he branded the project 'a gilded trash remake' of Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest—an accusation that manages to be both surreal and brutally concise. Brooks wrote that watching Melania is like enduring 'two hours of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch,' before delivering the death blow: 'Two hours of Melania feels like pure, endless hell.'

It's a line so sharp you can imagine it appearing on DVD sleeves in a long, ironic afterlife.

Critics Call Melania a 'Luxury Brand of Emptiness'

The New Yorker's Lauren 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 like Rush 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 at Deadline, Pete Hammond delivered the showbiz equivalent of a mercy killing: 'I watched Melania so 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 that Melania fails 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.

When Image Becomes a Mausoleum

Much of the ridicule stems from sheer disbelief at the budget. Amazon apparently spent $75 million to deliver a film that, according to Variety's Daniel 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 at The Independent was equally savage, dubbing Melania '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. And Empire's William Thomas, known for diplomatic understatement, couldn't resist a pun. This wasn't Triumph of the Will, he wrote—it was Triumph of the Shill, 'political propaganda at its most transparent, cynical, and very, very boring.'

Add one final nail from The Irish Times critic 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.

The Icy Codes of 'Melania'

Yet beneath the mockery lies something faintly compelling. Melania Trump was always an enigma sculpted for display: serenely unmoved, glacially photogenic, and somehow impossible to know. Melania—unintentionally or not—captures that perfectly. Every gleaming surface, every empty pause, every silent corridor seems to reinforce a kind of emotional vacuum polished to perfection.

Critics loathe the result because it mirrors what they already believe about her: that stillness has calcified into artifice. But perhaps, in its frigid perfection, Melania succeeds in the only way it could—as a monument to surface, a film so utterly self-involved it becomes pure metaphor.

Whether you see that as tragic or poetic depends entirely on how long you can stare at the marble. For most critics, about seven minutes was enough.