“Melania,” the big-budget Amazon documentary about Melania Trump, has been savaged by The Guardian, which gives it 1 out of 5 stars and frames it as glossy propaganda with almost no real insight into its subject.

What The Guardian Says

The Guardian’s review describes the film as:

  • “Dispiriting, deadly, and spectacularly unrevealing,” arguing that two hours with this documentary feels like “pure, endless hell.”
  • A “gilded trash remake” of Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest,” swapping moral seriousness for lavish surfaces and pageantry.
  • A work in which Melania drifts through scenes “like a listless automaton,” speaking often but revealing virtually nothing about her inner life, motives, or responsibility.

Visually, the film is full of designer clothes, ornate table settings, balls and fittings, but the review says it carefully dodges any meaningful engagement with politics, power, or complicity while Donald Trump and his allies, in the background, are depicted as dismantling democratic norms and institutions.

Main Criticisms Summed Up

The core of The Guardian’s critique is that:

  • The documentary is all image, no substance : luxury and spectacle are used as distraction from hard questions about Trumpism, democracy, and Melania’s role in it.
  • It “hardly qualifies as a documentary,” feeling instead like an expensive PR piece or “designer taxidermy” – something beautifully preserved but emotionally and morally hollow.
  • There could have been a powerful, probing film about ambition, image-making, and moral responsibility, but this version is, in their view, “beyond redemption.”

One example the review highlights is that the drama on screen centers on things like whether a dress is the right shade of white, not on any real ethical or political stakes.

How It Fits With Other Reviews

The Guardian’s take is very much in line with other early critics:

  • The Independent also gives the film 1 star, calling it a “dreadful piece of propaganda” and describing Melania as a “self‑absorbed, scowling void of utter emptiness.”
  • Deadline’s roundup notes that multiple outlets are at 1/5 stars, and suggests this may be one of the worst‑reviewed films of the year.
  • BuzzFeed and The Hollywood Reporter both emphasize how unusually harsh the reviews are, and they quote the same “two hours of endless hell” and “dispiriting, deadly, spectacularly unrevealing” language from The Guardian.

There are a few slightly softer takes (for example, the London Evening Standard seeing some attempt at humanity under the curated image), but The Guardian sits firmly on the scathing side and helps set the tone for the broader critical pile‑on.

Trending / Forum Reactions

Online, that Guardian review has fed into a wider wave of mocking and darkly comic commentary about Melania’s public image and the film’s aesthetic:

  • Social and forum posts compare the film’s vibe to a fashion‑obsessed dystopia or a “Handmaid’s Tale”‑style spectacle, focusing on the cold, distant presentation rather than any warmth or introspection.
  • Many commenters echo the critics’ sense that the documentary feels like rarefied pageantry for a would‑be royal court rather than a democratic political figure being examined honestly.

In other words, The Guardian’s one‑star “gilded trash” verdict isn’t an outlier; it has become one of the anchor reference points in the wider conversation about “Melania” as a shallow, expensively produced piece of image‑management rather than a serious documentary.

TL;DR: The Guardian’s “Melania” review slams the Amazon documentary as a lavish but empty PR exercise—“dispiriting, deadly, and spectacularly unrevealing,” a “gilded trash” pseudo‑documentary that buries any real insight under designer gowns and spectacle—helping cement its status as one of the year’s most brutally reviewed films.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.