Spencer Review: Kristin Stewart stars in Princess Diana’s real horror story

this Spencer The review was originally published in connection with the screening of the film at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. It was updated for the movie’s theatrical release on November 5th.

The biopic of Princess Diana Spencer is not your prototypical biographical film. On the other hand, the director of the film, the Chilean writer Pablo Larraín, is also not known for making well-known biopics. His depictions of Jackie Kennedy’s life after the murder of John F. Kennedy in Jackie, and the poet Pablo Neruda on the run from the new Chilean President Gabriel González Videla in Neruda, are raw, intrepid films that focus closely on a specific moment in the life of their actors.

Likewise with Spencer, Larraín doesn’t deliver the expected Princess Diana story. There is no courtship or fairytale wedding à la The crown. It does not mark their life with being a newborn baby destined for greater heights. It also doesn’t make them predictable as doomed victims. Instead of this, Spencer takes place on a Christmas weekend in 1991 at the Queen’s property in Sandringham. Diana (Kristen Stewart) is still in a strained marriage to Prince Charles (a cold Jack Farthing), or at least partially. During her stay, Diana struggles with her role as the mother of her two sons William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry) and faces her eating disorder, family history and the dominant men who rule her daily life.

Larraín’s film begins with a title card that reads “A Fable from a True Story” and is not based on an entirely true event. It doesn’t want to tell Diana’s life story either. Spencer is an act of psychological horror, a kind of ghost story, and a vital image carried by an eerily immersive Kristen Stewart in the best performance of her career.

Stephen Knight’s script doesn’t hit viewers over the head with the one constructed by the media The princess of the people Myth. Knight and Larraín are too smart to use tools that simple. Instead, they find more subtle ways to weave their legend into a realistic narrative. Spencer opens with Diana, without a chauffeur or bodyguard, who drives herself to Sandringham House. The confident queen loses her way and eventually decides to stop to ask for directions. In front of ordinary people, she assumes a shy, somewhat vulnerable disposition. Her eyes swing skyward as her head tilts to one side. The scene is the first contour in Stewart’s multi-layered portrayal of her: the differences between the private princess and the public one.

This is a biopic that takes a deep dive into analyzing Diana’s psychology, and especially her many demons. But not in a suggestive way. On the way to the Sandringham Estate, she sees a scarecrow in her father’s red coat standing in the middle of a field. (In real life, her father, John Spencer, died of a heart attack three months after Christmas.) She picks up the outerwear and hopes to have it cleaned. Diana grew up on the Queen’s estate in Park House, which made her trip to the Christmas celebrations both an encouraging homecoming and an unhappy duty, affecting her in different ways from a source of grief.

Diana connects with her ancestry in the film as well. Equerry Major Gregory (a beatable Timothy Spall), a rugged Scottish war veteran who is now for Queen Narcs, urges Diana to stick to tradition. In a “game”, visitors weigh themselves on arrival to see who is gaining the most weight over the holidays. This tradition causes Diana’s insecurities to bubble to the surface with her weight. And after finding a book about Anne Boleyn on her bed, which may have been put there by Major Gregory, she dreams of the distant relative, Henry VIII’s second wife, who was beheaded after he falsely accused her of adultery. Between the coat and the ghost of Anne Boleyn, Diana is drawn to her now condemned home.

Who can blame Diana for feeling trapped? Aside from her tailor and best friend Maggie (Sally Hawkins) and the personable cook on the estate, Darren (Sean Harris), she’s pretty isolated. But once again Larraín is too smart to narrow it down Spencer to sharpen Diana’s relationship with the other royals around her, or even her relationship with Charles and his lover, Camilla Parker Bowles. Instead, he directs focus by showing Diana trying to protect her sons from the archaic, closed traditions of the royals. But in the face of dominant men like Charles and Major Gregory, the indomitable protocol of the property, and her eating disorder, she can hardly protect herself. The mania she feels makes her Christmas vacation more of a struggle for survival than a getaway.

Jonny Greenwood’s score begins classically British and then turns into a nerve-wracking symphony. After a similar aesthetic as Jackie, Camerawoman Claire Mathon (Atlantic, Portrait of a Burning Lady) captures Diana in intrusive close-ups as her lens peers over the princess’s heartbreaking expressions. Mathon is also interested in the disturbingly manicured features of the property: the uniform garden, the strict movements of the strict servants, and the carefully prepared food and clothes that contrast with Diana’s free fall. Meanwhile, legendary Jacqueline Durran’s costume work covers the biggest hits of Diana’s most famous outfits, with an evocative selection of fashions that often hint at her state of mind.

But Stewart’s absolutely outstanding achievement is what brings Diana’s lore and Larraín’s idea of ​​her together, creating an elaborate version of the princess that doesn’t rely on broad or flashy instincts. Stewart folds her body to realize Diana’s nervousness, tilts her head in a familiar way, and gets the princess’s voice perfectly. But beyond that, her performance comes down to the eyes. Stewart’s eyes swing like switchblades through the grass. And every look calls for a different victim, showing a kind of forlornness or shyness, depending on the situation. It is her eyes that make her jump across the line of performance to a fully lived aura. There’s never a moment when Kristen Stewart exists as Diana. She is Diana.

The film has two high points, and one comes when Diana finally returns to her parents’ house. She is hectic and hallucinating, and Mathon’s camera approaches her even more dangerously. That’s where Jackie Editor Sebastián Sepúlveda shines and delivers a vivid and haunting montage of her life up to this moment. The other climax changes the tenor of the film from gloomy to solemn. Given the movie’s gloom and how deep it sinks into desperation, the quick result should feel maudlin towards festivity, almost like Larraín cheating on the story. But it works because the director knows that the audience has an inherent desire for Diana to have a happy ending.

In that sense, Larraíns is Spencer, an inspired portrait of the princess’s life that is more about finding new truths in her public and private persona than following the familiar beats of her life, is not the classic biopic audience that is used to watching . But it’s the inventive, iconoclastic film Diana deserves.

Spencer hits theaters on November 5, 2021.