Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Royalteen: Princess Margrethe’ on Netflix, the Second in a Series of DOA Norwegian Teen Romances

The saga continues: Royalteen: Princess Margrethe (now on Netflix) sequels the holy living crud out of 2022’s Norwegian teen romantic drama Royalteen, about the children of Scandinavian bluebloods. Both movies are based on a series of books by Anne Gunn Halvorsen and Randi Fuglehaug; the first focused on the romance between Prince Kalle (Mathias Storhoi) and average-citizen girl Lena (Ines Hoysaeter Asserson), but the second pushes our young lovebirds aside to follow Kalle’s twin sister Margrethe (Elli Rhiannon Muller Osborne), who acted like a total elitist shit before, apparently because she has all manner of problems. And those problems render her in a new light, shifting her from loathed antagonist to sympathetic protagonist – theoretically anyway, so let’s see if it happens or not, eh? 

ROYALTEEN: PRINCESS MARGRETHE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Royalteen ended on a cliffhanger, with Margrethe passing out cold in front of everyone at prom. It appears she’s about to be taken down a peg or 10. But first, some background: In this world, royal teens don’t have private tutors or attend highfalutin prep academies. No, they go to average-ass public school like everyone else, which makes them even more of a drain on the Norwegian taxpayers. And that’s why Margrethe mingles with commoners at the common prom – and how she ended up in the hospital with alcohol, cocaine and benzodiazepines in her bloodstream. Her towering homunculus classmate Gustav (Johannes Gjessing) is the source of the coke, and he also shot a video of Margrethe snorting it, which is quite a problem. 

Another problem is the Norwegian royals’ blatant lack of security or handlers who might put the kibosh on such shenanigans, since it soon becomes apparent that Appearances Are Everything, and said Appearances would be put in great jeopardy by images of the princess coating her sinuses with nose candy. It’s bad enough that everyone knows she ended up hospitalized for partying too hard, but that’s a symptom of a bigger problem: The pressure of a bright international spotlight. Also, her mother The Queen (Kirsti Stubo) suffers from crippling anxiety and sometimes can be found in bed at 4 p.m. with all the curtains drawn and the lights out and lots of pills by her bedside. Such is the source of Margrethe’s benzos, which she steals when Mommy’s too groggy to notice. And once Gustav is dodgy about deleting the as-yet-unleaked coke video – he sort of implies that he’ll do it in exchange for sexual favors – Margrethe starts having panic attacks. Who said living a life of enormous privilege was easy?

The point: Margrethe has an inner life, and it’s more than a little tormented. She has friends, though – Ingrid (Amalie Sporsheim) is her bestie, she’s OK with Kalle and Lena now, and maybe there’s some potential for romance with this guy Arnie (Filip Bargee Ramberg), a DJ who just dropped a hit single yo. They tend to party a lot, but maybe not quite as hard as Margrethe. There’s also Prince Alexander of Denmark (Sammy Germain Wadi), who’s flirty with her when the two royal families hang out in the Royal Norwegian Cabin for a ski weekend; heck, Alex, who looks delicious like summer sausage on a Ritz cracker, nearly walks in on Margrethe as she’s doing a Divinyls to his Insta selfies, if you get my drift. So the questions here are as follows: Is Margrethe an addict or what? Will she find a way to work through the stress of her school and social and family lives? And most importantly, who will she end up mashing face with? Nei spoilere! 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Princess Margrethe is sorta like The Princess Diaries crossed with something vaguely oppressively Norwegian – Insomnia? Sure. Close enough.

Performance Worth Watching: Osborne shows notable presence here, pretty much carrying the movie’s heavy, but also weirdly flimsy, drama – even when it ultimately only gives her about 1.5 notes to play.

Memorable Dialogue: Margrethe inhales a housekeyful of coke and sums up her life as it stands right now: “I’m utterly and completely miserable, but I feel amazing.”

Sex and Skin: Prince Alex has a fine bum. And Margrethe doesn’t look too bad in her skivvies. 

Our Take: I’m sad to report that the heart monitor attached to 2 Royal 2 Teen registers barely a blip. In movies like this, when there’s two or three potential romantic suitors, you usually can feel the electricity among our protag and her best match, but in this case, we have a brownout. A blown fuse. A sad little fzzzt and a teeny puff of smoke. Maybe it’s just not working because the Princess needs to pull herself together before she gets into a relationship? Or more accurately, maybe it’s because the movie treats the Princess’ rather serious family and mental health problems like subplots to be worked through? In fact, the romantic stuff is just a series of subplots, too. There’s no main plot here, just a hodgepodge of episodes in Margrethe’s bottomed-out life, adding up to a rom-dram spinning all four tires in a mudhole of mediocrity.

The film tries to find some dramatic traction in its overarching portrait of the Tragic Life Of The Royals – you know, the usual everyone-suffers-not-just-the-poors sentiment, where the king and queen and prince and princess must keep secrets from the public lest they cease being iconic representatives of ideal humanity and become, you know, actual human beings. This is the weary thematic fodder of pretty much every life-inside-the-palace saga, and Margrethe isn’t competent or ambitious enough to bring any fresh ideas to this trope. There’s a scene late in the film where Margrethe lets her guard down during a press conference, and I think it’s supposed to be a significant moment, but like every other dramatic turn in this thinly realized story – including a whopper of a third-act twist – it passes by us as we shrug, indifferent. Then the film denouments with a big dumb musical sequence and ends suddenly, like someone just pulled the plug. I’d say this is the point where the movie quite anticlimactically died, but that would imply that it was ever alive in the first place.

Our Call: Royalteen: Princess Margrethe fell down and broke its crown and nobody gave a damn. SKIP IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.