Don't let the trailer fool you. This film is one big cartoonish farce carry-on.

Rating: 2/10 (8 January 2019)

The film does touch upon the absurdism of the ruling elite but barely which is why I will give it a 2 instead of a 1. It is stunning that this film is THE first film that elicited a desire for me to go to sleep. Sadly, I couldn't because of the appalling repetitive strings and organ playing, the former of which attempts to create a sense of pacing, the latter a sense of imminent castastrophe. The advertising of the film led me to believe that the film would focus on the wider history of why Queen Anne is the way she is, examining her reign and so on. However, this is not what the film does at all. NOTHING HAPPENS.
Instead we get an initially semi-interesting but quickly uninteresting story of two largely similar machiavellian women who fight for the queen's affection, interspaced with a melange of scenes of palace debauchery, stunted attempts at comedic irony and absurdism, the odd slapstick moments and sarcastic "witticisms" that aren't really all that interesting of funny except if you are one of those who boast and prattle on endlessly endlessly about sarcasm being your "second language". The attempts to make the audience laugh are so frequent that the drama in the film is more akin to a bad television sitcom comedy-drama than a periodic drama. It's a shame that Queen Anne didn't play a more central role in the film. The acting was good, the writing and style of the film just wasn't.