Based on the novel Elvis and Me by Priscilla Presley, Priscilla becomes the latest film featuring a story with the King of Rock-N-Roll, Elvis Presley.

However, this time, the film is not specifically about Elvis. The protagonist of this film is Priscilla.

We start the film during the time when Elvis (Jacob Elordi) was in the army and in Germany. During this period, he met 14-year old Priscilla (Cailee Spaeny). These two hit it off, even though Elvis was considerably older than Priscilla. We saw how the pair of them grew closer as Priscilla continued at her school in Germany.

Eventually, Elvis convinced Priscilla’s father (Ari Cohen) to allow Priscilla to come to Memphis to finish school. He said that she would be looked after by his family and staff. Somehow, the father agreed to this. I guess when you are Elvis, you get things done.

The film, directed by Sophia Coppola, continued to follow Priscilla through the years, showing the tribulations of this first love mixing with toxic stardom.

This is absolutely the darkest presentation I have ever seen in reference to Elvis Presley. So much so that I might actually call him the antagonist of the film. Elvis was portrayed as a manipulative, control-freak that insisted on certain things that he expected Priscilla to do, to the point where Priscilla was becoming lost inside her own life.

I found a lot of these scenes very fascinating, although, prior to her death earlier this year, Lisa Marie Presley, Elvis and Priscilla’s daughter, complained about the characterization of her father in the script.

The performances were very strong, in particular Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi. Elordi’s performance was probably the most difficult since there was just recently an Oscar nominated portrayal of Elvis (from Austin Butler in Baz Luhrmann’s 2022 Elvis) and Elordi does a great job of doing something different and not just doing a copy.

I do feel as if there is something missing from the narrative of this film. The ending comes to an end suddenly and did not feel as if it built up to make sense. It seemed as if it needed something more than where it left off because the ending did leave me flat.

There were also a lot of scenes that felt as if it could have been trimmed from the script. There were several moments where I was not sure the purpose for the inclusion of certain scenes in the film and that there were other moments that could have done a better job of spelling out the ideas that Coppola wanted to get through to the audience. Sadly, by the last part of the movie, I was becoming kind of bored.

So I feel the performances were decent and the look at the relationship gave us something new between the two main characters, but I just did not feel the proper development of a narrative and there was too much that did not work. While it is not a terrible film by any stretch, Priscilla could have been so much more.

2.8 stars