Melania Trump’s self-titled documentary has debuted with better-than-expected ticket sales, according to studio estimates.

Melania took in $US7 million ($10 million) in ticket sales for its opening weekend – a flop for most films solid by documentary standards.

Amazon MGM Studios paid $US40 million ($57 million) for the rights, plus $US35 million ($50 million) to market it, making it the most expensive documentary ever.

Critics, however, have weighed in on Melania, and their verdicts are overwhelmingly negative.

According to review aggregation website Metacritic, Melania, as of Monday, had received a collective score of just seven out of 100 from critics, which indicates “overwhelming dislike.”

Similarly, Melania scored a mere 10 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes’ “Tomameter,” indicating that 90 per cent of reviews for the movie so far have been negative.

One particularly brutal review came from Nick Hilton, film critic for the Independent, who said that the US first lady came off in the film as “a preening, scowling void of pure nothingness” who leads a “vulgar, gilded lifestyle”.

Hilton added that the film is so terrible that it fails even at being effective propaganda and is likely to be remembered as “a striking artefact … of a time when Americans willingly subordinated themselves to a political and economic oligopoly”.

The Guardian’s Xan Brooks delivered a similarly scathing assessment, declaring the film “dispiriting, deadly and unrevealing”.

“It’s one of those rare, unicorn films that doesn’t have a single redeeming quality,” Brooks elaborated.

“I’m not even sure it qualifies as a documentary, exactly, so much as an elaborate piece of designer taxidermy, horribly overpriced and ice-cold to the touch and proffered like a mediaeval tribute to placate the greedy king on his throne,” he said.

Donald Clarke of the Irish Times discussed the film’s failure as a piece of propaganda, comparing it unfavourably to the work of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl.

“Melania … appears keener on inducing narcolepsy in its viewers than energising them into massed marching,” he wrote. “Triumph of the Dull, perhaps” in apparent reference to Riefenstahl’s 1935  Triumph of the Will.

Variety’s Owen Gleiberman argued that the Melania documentary is utterly devoid of anything approaching dramatic stakes, which results in the film suffering from “staggering inertia”.

“Mostly it’s inert,” Gleiberman wrote of the film. “It feels like it’s been stitched together out of the most innocuous outtakes from a reality show. There’s no drama to it. It should have been called Day of the Living Tradwife.”

Frank Scheck of the Hollywood Reporter found that the movie mostly exposes that Melania Trump is an empty vessel without a single original thought or insight, instead deploying “an endless number of inspirational phrases seemingly cribbed from self-help books”.

Kevin Fallon of the Daily Beast described Melania as “an unbelievable abomination of filmmaking” that reaches “a level of insipid propaganda that almost resists review.”

“It’s so expected,” Fallon added, “and utterly pointless.”