I was advised to read the young Queen Victoria’s diaries after seeing this placidly orthodox costume piece directed by Montreal film-maker Jean Marc Vallée, written by our own Julian Fellowes and somewhat surprisingly produced by, among others, the odd pairing of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, and Martin Scorsese.

Even a cursory perusal of Victoria’s own words shows exactly what this film lacks — to put it rudely, balls. It doesn’t come up with anything even halfway fresh to say about Queen Victoria.

Admittedly, it’s not the usual old frump we see, perpetually mourning her lovely Prince Albert after his death at 42. This is the young woman who refused a regency engineered by the Duchess of Kent — her overbearing mother — fell under the influence of the Whig Lord Melbourne rather than the Tory Duke of Wellington, was crowned at the tender age of 18, married Prince Albert by arrangement and fell quite erotically in love with him according to the diaries.

What do the film-makers make of this? Something so ponderously mundane that even the lively Emily Blunt as Victoria and the handsomely forthright Rupert Friend as Albert are stymied. The rest of the cast merely give carefully modelled but lifeless approximations of their characters and only Jim Broadbent as the ageing and angry King William livens things up. (A prize for anyone who spots Princess Beatrice’s bit-part debut as a Lady in Waiting.)

Added to this general sense of worthiness is an overbearing score which overlays almost every scene as if a large scale symphony orchestra is playing everywhere the young Queen goes.

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Sometimes you can barely hear the dialogue for the music telling us what to think about it. The Young Victoria is thus about as sexy as a cold fish and as imaginative as a kipper. The task of explaining the political and social mores of the day is too great, and little effort is made to show us what must have been an extraordinary romance between Victoria and Albert in a lively, perhaps even erotic way. You don’t necessarily want bed scenes galore, just something to suggest the sexual nature of the pair. After all, they did produce nine children.

Vallée ensures it is always nicely decorated and pretty to watch, and his actors — also including Paul Bettany as Melbourne, Miranda Richardson as the Duchess of Kent and Michael Maloney as Robert Peel — are by no means bad.  

Yet the general effect is bloodless and curiously bland, even when the script tries to convince us that the young Queen was entirely different from the old one with whom we are so familiar. Those who denigrate British period pieces will, I’m afraid, find plenty of ammunition here.