Spencer

Directed by Pablo Larraín

Running time: 1hr51 | REVIEWED BY GUY LODGE

Kristen Stewart stars in Spencer

This review originally ran at the Venice Film Festival

When it was announced that Pablo Larraín and Kristen Stewart were to make a new film about Princess Diana, people reasonably wondered if the subject wasn’t a bit spent. Wasn’t The Crown about to get into all that? But Spencer, the eerie, witty and quite extraordinary film that has resulted from their persistence, isn’t necessarily for fans of The Crown, or fetishists of royal ritual and ceremony. Indeed, it often goes perversely out of its way to avoid showing us such pomp, even as it spans the three-day ordeal of a Royal Family Christmas at Sandringham: it adopts the subjective, obstinate tunnel vision of Diana herself, spiralling into depression on the brink of ending her long-mouldering marriage, and keen to avoid meeting the gaze of as many of her in-laws as possible. 

And so, in turn, do we. Much of Spencer is consumed with Diana’s desperate efforts to be alone, with only us for company. We ride shotgun with her as she drives haphazardly through the countryside, we hover with her in the bathroom as she delays turning up for dinner, we follow her into the walk-in fridge after midnight as she decides she’s hungry after all. When she speaks, it’s largely to those below her in the chain of command: chefs and butlers and dressers and ghosts. (She’s either losing her mind or finding it at last: not for nothing do the long, depopulated hallways of Sandringham occasionally call the Overlook Hotel to mind.) Charles and the Queen get curt, hostile cameos; more dialogue is devoted to her children, presented here as just a few steps of fate from the normality that eventually eluded them.

But mostly, it’s just Diana, whose face is ever more closely and warmly cradled by cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire) as she attempts to back out of her surroundings entirely. As in Larraín’s equally brilliant, surprising Jackie, to which Spencer is an intricately attuned companion piece, the director thrills in presenting a public icon freed of her public, unsure how to act around herself: she wanders and runs and whirls through empty, undirected spaces, and deflates in a ballgowned heap by the toilet. Larraín again adopts that film’s blend of gliding formal precision and brash, delicious bad taste, though Mica Levi’s alien score from Jackie has been swapped out for equally unnerving, shuddering free-jazz compositions by Jonny Greenwood. 

Spencer is at once a work of great sensitivity and high, hilarious camp, less interested in identifying the “real” Diana than in building a living, breathing character in the blank space between costume, iconography and everything we’ve always speculated and assumed about her suffering. Casting Stewart, another reserved celebrity who knows the obsessive, overbearing glare of fandom better than most, is inspired. Her performance isn’t just a dully transformative feat of mimicry, though she’s paid detailed attention to Diana’s posture and posing, especially. Rather, it’s a wry, empathetic evocation of a woman somehow locked out of both her inner and outer lives, frozen in the corridor — before making a run for the fire escape.

SPENCER (2021) Written by Steven Knight | Shot by Claire Mathon | Edited by Sebastián Sepúlveda

In cinemas now.