Maria" is the final part of Pablo Larraín's trilogy about charismatic and very unhappy women caught at the moment of the greatest crisis in their lives.

In the case of Callas, the director decides not to play cat and mouse with the viewer and immediately reveals his cards. In the first shots, the camera slowly zooms in on a beautiful hall where people are thoughtfully walking, in the center a sheet peeks out from behind a chair: Callas died on September 16, 1977 in Paris from a heart attack. The rest of the film is the last week of the artist's life, which seems familiar from other works about the lives of talented and very unhappy people.

Callas lives alone in a huge apartment in Paris, more like a museum. Her favorite entertainment - walks around the city, memories and mountains of pills, because of which the singer constantly sees either her former lover Aristotle Onassis or non-existent journalists. Callas's last performance was some four years ago, and in the meantime she has lost both her lover and her voice, not quite having found out what she should live for. Therefore, she tries to regain her ability to sing at the cost of her health which is already gone.

On the whole, the set is rather standard for both the ZhZL genre and for Larraín himself. However, the director leaves the abstractness of "Spencer" and works with his usual artistic techniques literally. For example, one of the hallucinations from the drugs that were taken by the diva doesn't hide its psychedelic origin. It is noteworthy that he takes the form of a reporter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee) - after all, Callas lives in eternal retrospect. She must always remember the best years of her life and inform somebody about it.

Otherwise, the director refuses any embellishments that "Spencer" was so abundant with, and allows himself only a small collage of frames at the beginning, as if outlining the future film in broad strokes. The camera work here is handled by Edward Lackman (Carol, The Wonderful World), who knows how to shoot costume dramas very well. Lackman and Larraín first collaborated on last year's The Count, for which the cinematographer received an Oscar nomination.

Sad scenes of the present, written in warm autumnal tones, are cut through with brief black-and-white flashbacks that sketch in crucial facts about Callas's life. After all, the prima donna of the 20th century is hardly as familiar to the masses as Lady Di and Jackie Kennedy. And the world of opera is far from the most accessible to ordinary mortals. Meanwhile, Larraín, raised on opera, chooses musical fragments with care, gradually outlining the milestone moments of Callas's career.

These small episodes carry a simple idea: pain and trauma cannot be forgotten because it is from them that music is born. Generally, the tragedy of Callas-a loved star who loses the universal adoration-is painfully well-known to everyone who has ever watched a biographical drama about the lives of artists. It is worse than the pills the singer swallows. In this case, Larraín does not add depth to an already pretty worn-out genre.

Simultaneously, Angelina Jolie touches upon this raw nerve, after all, she has an idea of the position of a star, just like Callas, she too conceals herself from prying public eyes - for the last time, the actress came before the audience on the big screen in Eternals by Chloe Zhao back in 2021.

The theatricality of what is happening is enhanced by Steven Knight's script, in which the main character does nothing but make witty comments to everyone she meets. Jolie's beauty is the perfect frame for the image of an opera diva, and the actress clearly enjoys intellectual dialogues and the lack of action scenes.

However, despite all of Jolie's efforts, Maria Callas in her performance comes off as empty and flat, as if we knew all of the heroine's sorrows and joys in advance. Ultimately, Callas, as the director himself put it, became the sum of all the tragedies she played, and somewhere behind these images, her real life was hidden, which she ultimately could not cope with. A rather sad, albeit realistic, conclusion to the trilogy.