Royalteen: Princess Margrethe picks up from where its predecessor,Royalteen, left off. It is prom night, and Margrethe (Elli Rhiannon Muller Osbourne) of the royal family of Norway has overdosed on drugs, and fallen unconscious. Unsurprisingly, her parents are concerned more about their reputation than their daughter’s health.
The film, an adaptation of a Norwegian book series by Randi Fugelhaug and Anne Gunn Harvolsen, then spirals into a narrative about the many challenges that Margrethe faces––detachment issues, pressures of being in the spotlight, and the perils of being a symbol rather than living as a person. We see her struggle while juggling the multiple roles of a princess, high-schooler, friend, lover, sister and daughter. Even as she tries to forget her trainwreck of a prom-night, she has to deal with a scandalous video falling into the wrong hands. Her love life is in equal disarray. She gets rejected by her crush, and to top it all, has a fallout with her best friend.
A large chunk of the nearly two-hour-long film feels like a collection of these problems, put in one frame after the other. They, however, fail to form a cohesive narrative, preventing the audience from connecting with the protagonist. The superfluous writing, which doesn’t allow these characters to rise above the clichés of the genre, is to blame. Like every other bad high school coming-of-age flick, the stakes in this film never get high. Resolutions are convenient, and things fall into place almost magically. It appears that the writers simply stacked one issue after another for the first two acts, and decided to just erase it all in the last.
As it is, it’s tough to empathise with those suffering from first-world problems, let alone royals. By not exploring the depths of princess Margarethe’s troubles, Royalteen: Princess Margrethe only widens the
distance between the protagonist and audience, making the latter feel that the film is further away from reality than it should be.