English Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) is fighting a war in France. Lady Sarah (Rachel Weisz) is her favorite courtesan and is the power behind the throne. Her cousin Abigail (Emma Stone) arrives looking for a job after her family had fallen in status. Sarah looks down upon her and sends her to be a maid. She is being whipped when Sarah suddenly needs her to alleviates the Queen's gout pains. Leader of the opposition, Mr. Harley (Nicholas Hoult),is pushing for an immediate peace treaty while Sarah uses her power over the Queen to raise taxes to continue the war led by her husband at the front.

This is a wonderful competition of female relationships. It is deliciously passive-aggressive. All three performances are amazing. The visual style is impeccable. It is a movie of singular vision and great actors.

After having seen and become a fan of the very first series on Masterpiece Theater The First Churchills, I was anxious to see the different slant The Favourite had on what is an enlargement of the last years of that story. As The First Churchills was based on Winston Churchill's biography of his ancestor The Duke of Marlborough it was as expected slanted toward Sarah Jennings Churchill.

Accounts other than Churchill's cast Sarah as a shrew. As you see in the First Churchills, Sarah and Anne grew up together as playmates and were the most intimate of friends since puberty. When they were apart they wrote letters and gave each other pen names for their letters. Anne was Mrs. Morley and Sarah was Mrs. Freeman. The Duke of Marlborough was a great military commander, but no doubt his wife's influence with first Princess Anne when she was in line for succession and when she became Queen in 1702 the Marlboroughs were riding high.

The First Churchills had Margaret Tyzack as Anne who over the course of the series grew from an eager young princess to a rather dowdy queen. Olivia Colman's portrayal of Anne is of a woman who has nothing really left but the throne. This woman had several pregnancies from her husband, the longest surviving of their children who wasn't stillborn lived to be 9. Her husband a prince from Denmark also died.

By the time this all takes place Anne who patiently put up with Sarah Churchill's constant begging of favors and trying to influence policy was ripe for a new favorite. And in The Favourite Sarah herself introduces her own downfall into Anne's court with her own cousin Abigail Hill. It was a classic case of overplaying one's hand.

The three actresses who play Anne, Sarah, and Abigail dominate this film. Olivia Colman won the film's only Oscar for Best Actress playing Queen Anne and she is dowdy, tired, mercurial and plain tired and world weary all at once. Quite a few people died before she who never expected to be queen was. By all accounts she was a nice woman before being overwhelmed with the responsibility's of the throne. There's also more than a hint of a lesbian relationship with Anne and Sarah. Getting all those emotions out and then some is the hallmark of a great performance.

Rachel Weisz plays Sarah who like Susan Hampshire in The First Churchills just never knew when to quit. Emma Stone as Abigail knew exactly when to quit. She made a good marriage to Sam Masham who became a Baron. When Anne died, Abigail knew it was time to gracefully bow it. She lived quietly in the countryside and died in 1734. Sarah way outlived both Anne and Abigail dying 1748. Her saved correspondence provide a lively account of her era written from Sarah's point of view.

The Favourite's only Oscar was for Olivia Colman. Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone both got Supporting Actress nominations and the film also was nominated for Best Picture and a flock of other awards.

I really recommend seeing this and then getting a copy of The First Churchills. Or you might read Winston Churchill's award winning biography of the Duke to get Sarah's side in that magnificent Churchillian prose.

THE FAVOURITE is a follow-up from the same Greek director who made THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER, which I absolutely despised, so my reaction to this was something of a foregone conclusion. And it's another instance of the "emperor's new clothes", a film I and those with me found personally ridiculous and repulsive in equal measure, the only things of note the nice costumes and locations. Otherwise it's an exercise in crudity that just goes on and on, focusing on bodily functions over the niceties of plot or accuracy. Characters speak anachronistically, everyone's horrible, the performances - particularly from luvvy Colman - completely over the top. A hideous viewing experience, then; others are welcome to it.