Callas (2024): The Diva Reduced to a Shuffle

Callas (2024)
Directed by: Pablo Larraín
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Pierfrancesco Favino, Alba Rohrwacher, Haluk Bilginer, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Valeria Golino
Produced by: Fabula, The Apartment Pictures, Komplizen Film, Fremantle
Distributed by: Netflix (U.S.); theatrical releases in Italy and the U.K.
Running Time: 124 minutes
Language: English
Release Dates: World premiere at Venice Film Festival, 29 August 2024; U.S. limited release 27 November 2024; Netflix streaming 11 December 2024; Italian theatrical release 1 January 2025; U.K. release 10 January 2025; available on Amazon Prime

Maria Callas lived like an opera—loud, excessive, violent, and unforgettable. Her career was a sequence of triumphs and humiliations. Her voice divided audiences like no other. Her private life was its own running scandal. Callas (2025) with Angelina Jolie claims to capture all this. What it actually gives us is two hours of Jolie shuffling around a Paris flat, bingeing on prescription drugs and sighing at the furniture. It is a film of silence and slippers, not of song and scandal.

The pacing is punishing. The director seems to believe that every minute of inactivity is profound. Jolie swallows more pills. Jolies ignores breakfast. Jolie stares into mirrors. Jolie shuffles across the parquet floor like a widow marking time. Callas in life was a volcano; here she is reduced to a night light, flickering weakly until it goes out. It is astonishing that a story with this much natural drama should be made so lifeless.

The flashbacks are the only time the screen stirs. Snatches of arias remind us that Callas could hold an audience in terror and rapture. Yet even these are stingy. Instead of allowing her performances to breathe, the film gives us scraps, sliced into fragments and buried under long silences. Compare this with the real recordings: the terrifying precision of her Norma, the unhinged passion of her Tosca, the way her Medea could scorch a theatre into submission. Those were storms. Jolie’s flashbacks are drizzle. They neither convey her power nor tempt the uninitiated to listen further.

Aristotle Onassis, the great affair of her life, is treated as though he were an irritating neighbour. In reality, this was a relationship that humiliated her and made headlines across the world. The film reduces it to muttered conversations and weak gestures. Jolie’s Callas recalls him as though reading from a diary she barely remembers writing. The grandeur is gone, the despair gone with it. What should have been a Greek tragedy is rendered as background chatter.

And then there is “Mandrax,” the invented interviewer. His name is her preferred sleeping pill, which is fitting, since every time he appears the film sags further. His questions are banal, his function unclear. He provides no insight, no structure, no sense of revelation. He is not a character but a mistake—one more layer of artificiality in a film already suffocating itself with concept.

Which brings us to Jolie. The casting itself reeks of vanity. Jolie specialises in playing cool, sculpted women—glamorous but untouchable. Callas was not cool. She was shrill, vulnerable, erratic, yet unstoppable. Her artistry came from throwing herself, recklessly, into every note. Jolie cannot summon that. She floats through the part, porcelain-perfect but bloodless, as though afraid to sweat. When the flashbacks come, she does not sing—how could she? Instead, the film resorts to tricks and cuts, giving us glimpses of Callas’s greatness without ever letting Jolie attempt it. The result is worse than dishonest: it makes Callas feel smaller, as though her art can be represented only in hints, not in full.

The dishonesty runs deeper still. The film insists that it is peeling back myth to show us the “real” woman. But without myth, what is left is emptiness. Jolie’s Callas has no passion, no humour, no ferocity. She is a recluse mumbling to herself. If this were accurate, it would still be unwatchable. But it is not accurate. Recordings, interviews, even photographs make clear that Callas retained her force until the end—brittle, erratic, sometimes desperate, but always dramatic. Callas drains her of this vitality and leaves a corpse on the screen.

I am not a worshipper of Callas. I can hear the flaws in her voice, and I do not swoon over her like the cult that surrounds her name. But even I know she was an artist who could terrify a theatre into silence. This film offers none of that. By the end, I was not moved to play any of her recordings. I was not minded of her stature. I was simply bored, counting the minutes until the credits.

The tragedy here is not Callas’s life. The tragedy is that this is the film chosen to memorialise her. A woman who embodied opera itself has been flattened into an arthouse cliché—pills, anorexia, sighs. A performance style that could ignite scandal in a single note has been reduced to fragments. And a love affair that shook the jet set has been filmed like small talk over tea.

Maria Callas deserved a film of wild excess. What she got was Angelina Jolie drifting round a flat, pretending stillness is insight. I walked out knowing less about Callas than when I went in, and caring even less than that.