Maria is an exquisitely crafted tone poem with Angelina Jolie enacting Maria Callas' final days

Director Pablo Larraín has a fascination with beautiful, melancholy women, and with Maria he delivers a haunting aria.

Of his "sad woman" trilogy, which includes Jackie and Spencer, Maria is the most impeccable of the bunch.

Angelina Jolie stars as opera diva Maria Callas in the last week of her life. Living in isolation with her butler and housekeeper in Paris, Maria has not sung in front of an audience in four and a half years. Only 53, she is frail and lonely, dogged by hallucinations of a news crew to whom she recounts parts of her life story. She attempts to return to singing, if only for her own satisfaction, despite warnings from a physician. She seeks validation from all she encounters, explicitly visiting restaurants where she can count on the waiters to fawn over her.

The film is more elegiac tone poem than structured narrative, echoing Maria's dreamlike trance induced by her abuse of medication and nostalgia for her glory days. Larraín exquisitely composes every image, placing the fragile figure of Maria in jewel box settings that are framed with the lush care of a Rococo painting.

The spectacle and grandeur of the opera emanate from every frame, emphasizing Maria's vulnerability within cavernous spaces. Jolie, often an enigmatic actress, employs her mystique to convey Maria's own air of detached mystery while also digging deep into the diva's psychological wounds. Jolie wanders through the frame with a paradoxical blend of imperious diva and lost little girl. Not to mention how she delivers on the vocal component of the role, her singing voice synthesized with recordings of the real Callas.

But it is Jolie's ability to depict a woman owning everything she is that makes her performance truly sing. After enduring the cruelty of her mother and controlling men, Maria, at the end of her life, is finally saying her own thoughts out loud. It's a remarkable portrait of a woman reckoning with herself, even as her body fails her.

Larraín is a master of craft and Maria is no exception, as he uses the vistas of Paris and operatic musical numbers to showcase the fragile state of Maria's mind — and the ways she uses music to make sense of her life. A tuxedo-clad chorus of men sing on a plaza in front of the Eiffel Tower and Maria stands and basks in the music, embracing her need for validation.

All of the story floats behind a dreamy veil (except for black-and-white flashbacks that are sterile in the ways they reveal the limiting and harsh tones of black-and-white scenes shot on digital). Thus, it's never clear when we're witnessing something real or something imagined. But as Maria tells her butler, it's none of our business what's real and what's not. All that matters is giving ourselves over to the music, much like an audience must do at an opera.

Callas is a thorny figure, a woman saddled with hang-ups and illness, who earned the reputation of being a diva for having the audacity to speak up for herself. Maria unpacks that, granting Callas bon mots like "I come to restaurants to be adored" and "a song should never be perfect, it should be performed." But for every indulgent quip or demand, we also see the delicate creature underneath. Jolie allows us to see how the defiant tigress version of Callas is as much a role to be played as any of her operatic endeavors. It's a story of deterioration bathed in golden light and decorated with beautiful accouterments.

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While grief and mental illness were primary components of Jackie and Spencer, here, Larraín probes the music that can come from such misery. Maria is a restless soul, an unreliable narrator, and an imposing presence. She bristles at the notion of being a man's possession in a cabinet, despite the fact that many of her fans treat her with the same entitlement as her lovers. This is a portrait of all that an artist must sacrifice for their work and the ways that is amplified further as a female artist. It's a fable of fame and control, but it's also an ode to a woman who could only find peace by singing her heart out. Grade: A-