A pristine prison. A gilded cage. A king and his queen. The antithesis of 'Elvis (2022)': quiet, subdued, grotesque in its content rather than its execution. An exercise in restraint. The lonely moments in-between the glamour. The grooming. The controlling. The waiting. A series of moments. Like its focal relationship, it's pretty on the surface but (at least a little) hollow at its core. For a movie supposedly about Priscilla, it doesn't really tell us anything about her. Who is she other than the living doll Elvis decides to bring home one day? Of course, that's the point. 'Priscilla (2023)' highlights the abuse inherent in a relationship built upon this many different power imbalances. It's a sickly movie, one that constantly sends shivers up your spine with its mundane horrors. "Ninth grade? Jesus, you're just a baby" is followed shortly by "shall we go somewhere quiet?"; "She's much more mature than her age" comes just before "I'll find her a good Catholic school"; a dependency on pills, a necessity to stay by the phone, and a requirement to look a certain way all arrive before a high school graduation. A stolen childhood is marked by red flags ignored by a little girl in love with a legend. For this purpose, it makes sense to exclusively show Priscilla trapped by her relationship with everyone's favourite died-on-the-toilet joke. Despite always being in her perspective, we're never really let inside her head. However, surely the point is that the relationship doesn't actually define her as a whole, and if the intention is to show Priscilla's unconventional coming of age, to show her growing into a woman capable of understanding - and changing - her situation, surely the bad must be offset by the good? Surely we must be given an insight into who she can become once she's out from under Elvis' thumb? The film feels like the first half of the story it's trying to tell, which makes its speeding through the latter stages of its central couple's marriage all the more strange. These later sequences would be the perfect opportunity to show Priscilla evolving into the woman she's going to become after the credits have rolled. They're glossed over, though. They're not given the same attention as the grooming and the gaslighting and the generally gross behaviour. While it presents all those things in a low-key yet impactful fashion, it just feels like it's missing something thematically. It's well-performed, well-directed and visually gorgeous, but there's the sense that it's only half of what it needs to be. It's not a bad film, by any means. It's affecting and uncomfortable and mostly engaging from start to finish. It's self-assured and unwilling to dip into caricature. There's something strangely alluring about its beautiful emptiness, too. It feels real, far more real than the other film featuring Elvis I mentioned earlier. It's good, but it's not great. Whether it's vapid is debatable, but whether it's as deep as it could have been isn't.
Review of Priscilla
