Disappointingly pretentious, pointless and psychotic film

Rating: 2/10 (1 March 2019)

THE FAVOURITE appears to be about Queen Anne (an illustrious unknown to me, even after reading about her) and her sexual and other vagaries while supposedly leading her kingdom -- though Lady Marlborough (Weisz) is the real power behind the throne, and the queen's firm favourite and sexual consort.
That is, until the character played by Emma Stone bursts upon the mud; She has fallen out of grace because of her family's misfortunes and she is a distant cousin to Lady Marlborough. She rapidly surmises that the queen is the only way out of menial service, and she jostles to become the queen's favourite, and in the process engages in personal war with her cousin, with bad consequences for both.
Overlong, very pretentious, pointless from a historic and didactic standpoint, this film is something of a psychotic foray, and its greatest attempts at shocking are the use of profanities and expletives. It is also a sexist film, in which males are portrayed as stupid, vain, irrelevant, powerless and risible.
Lanthimos' direction is disordered, as reflected in the credits that you cannot read, and in the over the top performances (Colman reminded me of Kathy Bates in MISERY (1990), but without the bite of that performance); it keeps repeating lugubrious scenes in the palace's corridors; dialogue is repetitive; and the annoying and anachronistic soundtrack, including what appears to be a most disagreeable and jarring beat of a pendulum, had me wanting to walk out early on.
Lanthimos also shamelessly borrows ideas from TOM JONES (UK 1963), which showed England's royal court as a place of carnal, Epicurean, and other excesses - but at least TOM JONES posted superb acting down to the smallest role; it had a crisp pace, running on zany comedy interspersed with shocking reality; and it did not need offensive language to make its point.
Ultimately, the caged rabbits are the queen's real favourites and they reflect the film's level of intelligence. The vague ending only emphasizes the pointlessness of the entire exercise.
Finally, I fail to see how this dud can get such a high overall IMDB rating when so many reviews award it 1 or 2 stars. Best avoided.