Priscilla – an infantilised woman trapped by her adoration of a self-absorbed man? (UK/Irish cinemas from 1 January)

Fourteen-year-old Priscilla Beaulieu is introduced to Elvis by one of his military friends. He’s serving with the US military in Germany. Ten years his junior, she’s naïve, shy and besotted. The singer is made out to be homesick – something they have in common – and grieving his mother’s death.

Her mother and stepfather have doubts about the emerging relationship, but miraculously are persuaded to let her to travel to the US to visit Elvis, later agreeing to her shifting her education to the US and be chaperoned, a condition that the film clearly portrays as not being enforced. Soon she’s popping the same pills as her beau and living in Graceland, soaking in the parts of the Presley lifestyle that she’s allowed to enjoy.

The first hour of the film Priscilla is full of ‘ick’; the second half has more red flags than an 18-hole golf course.

We’re led to believe – via Priscilla Presley’s autobiography upon which the screenplay is based – that while her flesh was willing, Elvis held back in a spirit of chasteness (something he didn’t extend to other women he met before, during and after moving Priscilla into his home). Physically affectionate but sexually reluctant, Elvis is also increasingly absent, leaving Priscilla – “the only girl I ever love” – nursing a puppy and her maths homework while he makes movies and headlines are written about affectionate liaisons with female co-stars.

There’s little attempt to dodge the elephant in the room. Elvis may (or may not) have set some physical boundaries, but even that is another aspect of his controlling behaviour, which is accented by being creepy, coercive, dismissive and eventually violent. Infantilised Priscilla is trapped by her love and her total investment in a man who could so readily afford to drop her and move on leaving her with nothing. Fourteen years on from meeting Elvis, the film concludes with a final scene in which she regains control before the soundtrack fades to the terribly apt Dolly Parton’s I Will Always Love You (a song the country star refused to allow Elvis the rights to cover).

The superb Cailee Spaeny captures a real sense of a fragile Priscilla growing up, growing in smarts, learning how to exert agency over small matters (at one stage getting the never seen domineering figure Colonel Tom Parker to lean on Elvis). Yet she is nearly always cuts a lonely figure in the sycophantic crowd that surrounds Elvis, and is frequently undermined by his selfish and self-absorbed interventions.

Jacob Elordi – just a year older than Spaeny in real life – looms large over his petite co-star, visually emphasising the power imbalance lest anyone in the audience forget what was happening. Elordi has the performance moves of Elvis but we never get to hear him sing since rights to use the rock and roll star’s tracks were denied.

Despite his giant presence on screen – whether exuberant or depressed – director and screenwriter Sofia Coppola ensures that Spaeny/Priscilla always remains the focus of attention. At my opening night screening, the audience was nearly exclusively female, audibly gasping at the treatment of the young girl at the hands of older but not wiser folk around her: so many family and friends have the opportunity to intervene but choose not to.

Priscilla tells a complex domestic story that helpfully introduces the audience to more than just one villain. Coppola questions where innocence begins and ends. She’s happy that Elvis gets the blame for Priscilla’s own hinted at infidelity as what’s left of the relationship spirals out of control. The opening credits list Priscilla Presley as a producer of the film, adding to the sense that this is her cinematic memoir, sometimes tender, nearly always toxic. 

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