Spencer review: Kristin Stewart stars in Princess Diana’s real-life horror story

These are the best Spencer review was originally published in conjunction with the film’s screening at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. It has been updated for the film’s theatrical release on Nov. 5.

Biopic about Princess Diana Spencer isn’t your prototypical biographical film. Then again, the film’s director, Chilean auteur Pablo Larraín, isn’t known for making familiar biopics, either. His depictions of Jackie Kennedy’s life after John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Jackie, and poet Pablo Neruda on the run from new Chilean president Gabriel González Videla in Neruda, are raw, unflinching films that focus closely on a specific moment in their subjects’ lives.

Similar with Spencer, Larraín doesn’t provide the expected Princess Diana story. There’s no courtship or fairy-tale wedding, à la The Crown. It doesn’t chart her life from being a newborn fated for greater heights. It doesn’t affix her as an unpredicted victim. Instead, Spencer takes place during a Christmas weekend in 1991, at the Queen’s Sandringham estate. Diana Stewart (Kristen Stewart), is in an unhappy marriage with Prince Charles (a cold Jack Farthing). During her stay, Diana contends with her role as a mother to her two sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), and faces her eating disorder, her family’s history, and the domineering men who script her daily life.

Opening with a title card reading “A fable from a true story,” Larraín’s film isn’t based on a wholly true event. Nor does it want to tell Diana’s life story. SpencerThis is a psychological horror story and survival story that Kristen Stewart performs with uncannily great skill.

Stephen Knight’s script doesn’t bang viewers over the head with the media-constructed people’s princess mythos. Knight and Larraín are too smart to use such easy tools. They instead find more subtle ways to make her story believable. SpencerDiana drives herself to Sandringham House without the assistance of a bodyguard or chauffeur. She loses her way and eventually stops to ask directions. She assumes an insecure, shy appearance before normal people. She looks up as her head turns to one side. The scene is the first contour in Stewart’s layered portrayal of her: the differences between the private princess and the public-facing one.

This is a biopic acutely concerned with parsing Diana’s psychology, and specifically, her many demons. It’s not a very salacious story. While heading to Sandringham Estate, she sees a scarecrow standing in the middle of a field, wearing her father’s red coat. In real life John Spencer was her father. He died of heart failure three months later. In the hope of having it cleaned, she goes back to fetch her outerwear. Diana grew up on the Queen’s estate in Park House, making her journey to the Christmas festivities both a heartening homecoming and an unfortunate duty, causing a wellspring of grief to affect her in varying fashions.

The film also shows Diana connecting with her family. Equerry Minor Gregory (a punkable Timothy Spall), is a scraggly Scottish war veteran, who urges Diana to adhere to tradition. One “game” has visitors weigh themselves at the beginning on arrival, to see who gains the most weight over the holidays. This tradition causes Diana’s insecurities with her weight to bubble to the surface. She dreams of Anne Boleyn the distant relative of Henry VIII. Diana finds herself drawn towards her once-condemned childhood home by Anne Boleyn’s coat and spirit.

Diana feels locked in, and who can blame her? Other than her tailor and best friend Maggie (Sally Hawkins), and the estate’s sympathetic chef Darren (Sean Harris), she’s pretty much isolated. But once again, Larraín is too smart to limit Spencer to honing in on Diana’s relationship with the other royals around her, or even her relationship with Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. Instead, he pulls focus by depicting how Diana is trying to protect her sons from the royals’ archaic, closed-off traditions. She can’t defend herself against the domineering Charles and Major Gregory and the rigid protocol of her estate, as well as the eating disorder and the strict protocols, however. She feels maniac and Christmas is more about survival than it is about escaping.

Jonny Greenwood’s score opens as classically British, then morphs into an unnerving symphony. The score follows a similar style. Jackie cinematographer Claire Mathon (Atlantics, Portrait of a Lady On Fire) captures Diana with intrusive close-ups, her lens peering over the princess’ heart-rending facial expressions. Mathon also takes great interest in the disturbingly manicured features of the estate: the uniform garden, the exacting movements by the austere servants, and the meticulously prepared food and clothes, which contrast with Diana’s freefall. Meanwhile, the costume work by the legendary Jacqueline Durran covers a greatest-hits of Diana’s best-known outfits, with an evocative array of fashions that often speaks toward her mental state.

Photo by Neon

But Stewart’s absolutely outstanding performance is what pulls together Diana’s lore and Larraín’s conception of her, creating a fleshed-out version of the princess that isn’t reliant on broad or showy instincts. Stewart folds in her body to actualize Diana’s nervousness, tips her head in a familiar way, and gets the princess’ voice pitch-perfect. Her performance is largely down to her eyes. Stewart’s eyes swing like switchblades through the grass. Each glance takes another victim. Depending on the circumstance, Stewart’s eyes can display either forlornness (or shyness) depending on what is happening. It’s her eyes that jump her over the line of performance to a totally lived-in aura. There’s never a moment where it’s Kristen Stewart as Diana. She is Diana.

Two climaxes are featured in this film. The first is Diana’s return to her childhood house. She’s frantic and hallucinating, and Mathon’s camera closes even more perilously into her. Here is the place. Jackie editor Sebastián Sepúlveda shines, providing a vivid and haunting montage of her life leading up to the moment. This climax changes the tone of the film, turning it from gloomy to joyful. Considering the gloominess of the film, and how deep into despair it descends, the quick upshot toward revelry should feel maudlin, almost like Larraín is cheating against history. Because the director is aware that Diana wants a happy ending, it works.

In that sense, Larraín’s Spencer, an inspired portrait of the princess’ life that’s more concerned with finding new truths in her public and private persona than following the familiar beats of her life, isn’t the classic biopic audiences are used to watching. It is, however, the film Diana deserves.

SpencerAmerican theatres will welcome them on November 5, 2021.