Following 2016’s Jackie and 2021’s Spencer, Chilean movie maestro Pablo Larraín completes his trilogy of biopics featuring remarkable 20th-century women with Maria, a sad yet sumptuous look at the final days of American-Greek opera sensation Maria Callas. Angelina Jolie gets stuck into some glass-shattering singing as ‘La Divina’, a role she was born to play. Set predominantly in Paris, Maria counts down to Callas’ death in 1977, aged 53. Through flashbacks depicting happier times, it pits Callas’ reclusive later life, spent in the company of her devoted butler and housekeeper (Pierfrancesco Favino and Alba Rohrwacher), against her career triumphs and decade-long romance with Haluk Bilginer’s Aristotle Onassis.

The film blends the singing voices of Callas and Jolie (who spent seven months learning to perform opera and whose vocals were captured live on set), relying more heavily on recordings of Callas for the scenes set during her heyday, with Jolie doing some impressive singing herself, particularly during the movie’s final act. Jolie makes a fabulous focal point in a series of offbeat and outrageously glamorous outfits while the film requires her to do an awful lot of beautiful moping which she carries off with style. She brings to the fore the neediness, arrogance and insecurity of Callas as she shrinks from the spotlight, making the most of Steven Knight’s showy, theatrical dialogue.

Knight’s treatment of the material does feel somewhat superficial, and never really gets to the heart of who Callas was, ultimately feeling less emotionally engaging than Jackie and Spencer. It is, however, enjoyably eccentric at points, with some hallucinatory episodes and visual variety, while Larraín directs with typical aplomb. Buoyed by its virtuosic vocals, Maria is a fitting tribute to a legend that gorgeously illustrates the torment which so often goes hand in hand with greatness.

Maria is in cinemas from Friday 10 January.