A complete farce. Highish expectations dashed.

Rating: 2/10 (9 January 2019)

The film has little direction. Yes, there are characters who drive "the narrative", but there is little focus and centrality on the queen. Instead we see two women competing for the queen's affections mostly to maximise their personal prestige. These two characters, both being masters of manipulation, define the film's entire content. They aren't redeemable or even likeable in the slightest unless you are the type of person who happens admires powerful machiavellian sorts of people who are venomous towards each other. Oh and apparently that was funny to some members of the audience, though only a minority. I think the only reason it was regarded as so was because they were women who are basically saying subtle passive aggressive things, a bit like the sort of incidents that happen in boorish tv soap dramas. The film would've been better if they had explored more in depth and mademore central the character of the queen but any personal analysis of her was pretty superficial. The trailer that was shown to advertise the film and lure an audience seemed to encapsulate the best bits of in the entire film.
The sound was pretty abysmal, repetitive and unbearable to hear during several scenes.
There are plenty of 'scenes that are just stuck in for no good reason other than to try to set the tone or establish pacing, but they are excessive and end up dragging out the love triangle story unnecessarily. This is presumably done in the name of artistic license but it all feels a bit forced, as if to make the audience think they've seen more than they actually have. I suppose this magic trick it works for those who are easily impressed by the film's aesthetics and those who favour a long-running dialogue as opposed to a guided plot which allows the potential for more things to actually happen. Good acting doesn't mean much without an engaging plot.
Truth be told, I had no idea that the film was directed by the director of The Lobster and Dogtooth. I'm not someone who has ever needed to check a film's director to assess whether it's worth the time to watch it. However, I have found that with Yorgos Lanthimos' films this is highly required as they tend to be so absurdist that they always ruin any attempt to maintain coherence, emotional engagement or intrigue. This film is so absurdist that it feels more like you're watching the raw thoughts in someone's head, a dream, rather than an organised, finished work. For some, the very fact that it is so absurdist and trangresses the traditional boundaries of a film genre would perhaps be appealing and gloriously avante-garde. Personally, I didn't think this and found that this formula started to go stale pretty quickly. Thus, by the end I was left feeling completely unsatisfied.