Melania (Prime Video) 2026

I’ve watched my fair share of biopics and documentaries. Well made ones are engaging, focused, and coherently convey’s its story and message. Which brings me to MELANIA (2026), a documentary about the wife of tycoon Donald Trump and this term’s First Lady of the USA. 

It follows Melania Knauss Trump as she leads the preparations for Donald Trump’s inauguration as the 47th president of USA. In between the preparation work, we are given anecdotal snippets of Melania’s upbringing in Slovenia, her early interest in fashion, and how it brought her to the USA and eventually to marrying Donald. Other narrations go into her personal motivations, the goals of her “Be Best” campaign, and what drives her. 

 

The movie starts right out the gate as we follow a motorcade right out the gate or Mar A Lago resort. Immediately, the footage impressed me. These are impressive production values! Visually, with the camerawork and colour grading, it looks like a high end Hollywood movie. 

A lot of shots show off the elegance and opulence of various locales. A slow rotation through rooms of classy wood, marble and gold, zoom-ins on exorbitant looking vases, camera pans across lavish furniture, intricate glassware, high end branded vehicles, breathtaking views from the top floors of skyscrapers and of course lingering shots of Melania clad in various fancy outfits. 

 Partway through, I realised a sort of formula had set in. The luxury car drives around, set to a licensed song, before pulling up to a location where Melania enters and goes about with the prep work. We get some narration by Melania herself, then anecdotal interview snippets of those at said location, before we move on back to a car. And the cycle repeats maybe 5 more times until finally concluding with Trump’s inauguration ceremony. I realised then that I really did not see a point to the documentary. For a movie promising a more intimate look into the life of Melania Trump, it really does not cover anything that mainstream media, interviews or Wikipedia had already covered. 

There is a lot of “tell” particularly about her upbringing, very little “show” when it comes to Melania herself. No doubt the “show” is in the earlier mentioned displays of extravagance. What we are shown however are scenes of Melania being……difficult. The short interviews with the tailors, assistants, designers and other folks involved in the preparations commend Melania’s high standards and laud her for firmly knowing what she wants. 

Yet I cannot tell if it’s what she says or how she says it but Melania Trump comes across, firstly, as extremely indecisive. This is seen in the many instances where she requests one thing, and then requests to change it after the thing is implemented, and then at one point even change it back to how it was before, requiring her collaborators to go back to the drawing board again and again. 

 Secondly, she seems unbelievably curt. There are hardly any pleasantries exchanged beyond a restrained greeting. No “please” no “thank you so much”, just “I want it like this”. It feels less like a leader among team members, and more like an amalgamation of a fussy customer and a queen among her subjects. The kind of person who would be the bane of any retail worker were she not paying top dollar.

 Then there is a weird tendency for interviews or dialogue to be cut off right in the middle of a sentence or be drowned out by Melania’s own narration, almost like she was rudely talking over everyone else. And if it was not Melania’s narrator, it would be one of the many licensed songs, some of which I question their placement in the context of the movie and the greater going-ons of President Trump’s political decisions.

 For example, the first song to open the movie accompanying Melania as she goes from Mar A Lago resort to an airport to a plane and to some other place is “Gimmie Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. The lyrics go “war, children. It’s just a shot away. Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away.” Considering what President Trump has authorised in the Middle East and what he had been accused of right around the release of this movie , these words are weirdly prophetic. And therein lies the problem. Half the time the movie does not do a very good job of presenting Melania Trump, and by extension Donald Trump, in a flattering light. 

If there was a theme throughout the movie, I admit it was lost on me. At times it feels like it is making fun of her. While she barks orders at assistants, we get a snippet of one of them walking past the camera with a look that seemed to be the start of an eye roll before it cut away. The truncated interviews start to sound like “clever” editing to reframe neutral conversation into positive sound bytes.

 At one point Melania’s narration speaks about how much she loves her husband and son, only for the song “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson to accompany footage of Baron Trump. “Billie Jean” has the lyrics “the kid is not my son”. Again the sense of satirical dissonance sets in. What is this movie going for? Is it meant to promote or parody? I cannot tell!