In a move that has left critics baffled, viewers bored, and historians reaching for the smelling salts, Netflix’s new biographical film Melania: A New Dawn has premiered to a resounding chorus of “wait, what?” The film, a lavishly funded, softly lit exploration of the former First Lady’s journey from “model to MAGA,” is being described as “an avalanche of nothing” and “a screensaver with a budget.”
Director Lars Van der Linden, known for his gripping documentaries about Scandinavian interior design, claimed he sought to capture “the profound silence within the noise.” Critics argue he succeeded a little too well. “The film treats Melania’s life like a fragile, dusty diorama in a museum no one visits,” writes entertainment site The Spool. “We see the gowns, the stoic posing, the infamous ‘I really don’t care, do u?’ jacket, but any hint of a internal monologue, a motivation, or a pulse is carefully airbrushed out. It’s like watching a perfume ad for 97 minutes.”
But the film’s most glaring omission, according to sharper commentators, isn’t just a lack of psychological depth—it’s the gaping, elephant-in-the-room-sized hole where her professional and social history should be. The movie seamlessly glides from her childhood in Slovenia to the glamorous runways of Milan and Paris, portraying a world of high fashion as pristine as a Melania-styled White House rose garden.
“It’s a masterclass in selective curation,” snarked media critic Benji Alvarez on The Discourse Podcast. “The film frames her modeling career with all the controversy of a Vogue spread. There’s more dramatic tension in her choice of heels than in the film’s utter avoidance of the… let’s say, grittier freelance circuits of European modeling in the 1990s.”
Alvarez is, of course, alluding to the long-documented reports, never substantiated in a court of law but persistent in biographies and investigations, that connect Melania’s early career to the world of soft-core porn magazines and, more darkly, to modeling agencies alleged to have been fronts for trafficking and exploitation by organized crime figures. The film doesn’t just avoid this murky water; it acts as if the entire ocean doesn’t exist.
“The most thrilling sequence is when she loses a passport,” tweeted film reviewer Maya Chen. “And even that’s handled with the tension of someone misplacing a grocery list. Meanwhile, the names of men like Jean-Luc Brunel (a close associate of her alleged booker, and later a charged sex trafficker who died by suicide) or the infamous ‘Modeling Agency No. 6’ in Milan are conspicuously absent. It’s biography as bullet-point resume, scrubbed clean by a team of expensive lawyers.”
The film’s climactic moment is her walk across the White House lawn to become First Lady, shot in slow motion with a swelling, triumphant score. “It’s presented as the culmination of a fairy tale,” writes The New York Sentinel in a scathing review titled “The Omission Administration.” “A narrative of self-made success. What’s chilling is the total erasure of the machinery—the potentially exploitative, dangerous, and legally dubious machinery—that often propels young women from Eastern Europe onto the international stage. The film isn’t just kind to Melania; it’s an accomplice to a much larger, glossier silence.”
In a statement, the production company defended its approach: “Our film is an authorized portrait focusing on Mrs. Trump’s dignity, resilience, and contributions as First Lady. We chose to focus on the positive and inspirational aspects of her journey. Other narratives are unverified and belong to the realm of tabloid speculation.”
The audience response has been muted. Viewership numbers are reportedly steady but unremarkable, with most completions likely coming from audiences who simply forgot to turn it off. “It’s the perfect background film,” one viewer commented. “You can fold laundry, check your phone, and occasionally look up to see a very beautiful woman looking pensive in front of various monuments. It asks nothing of you, explains nothing, and ultimately says nothing. Fitting, perhaps.”
Melania: A New Dawn is now streaming on Netflix. It is rated PG for prolonged sequences of impeccable posture and thematic elements of profound ambiguity.