Review: Spencer Renders Diana’s Inner Workings as a Grand Guignol Spectacular

Pablo Larraín’s film readily conjures a paranoia-suffused atmosphere of fear for what might happen at any moment.

Spencer
Photo: Neon

The holidays are a fraught time of the year for anyone dealing with familial dysfunction, never mind if you’re the black sheep of the British royal family. That’s the almost brazen angle of director Pablo Larraín’s Spencer, a heightened look at three days in the life of Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart), née Diana Frances Spencer, at the end of 1992, around the time of the real-life announcement of her separation from her husband, Prince Charles (Jack Farthing). Self-billed from the outset as “a fable from a true tragedy,” the film preps us for a biopic that’s equal parts pitch-black domestic dramedy and outright horror.

On Christmas Eve, the royal family gathers at Sandringham Estate to celebrate the holidays—everyone, that is, except for Diana. With her marriage publicly on the rocks, she decides to make the drive herself and, even though she grew up in this area of Norfolk, promptly gets lost in the winding rural roads near the estate, seemingly as a result of her anxiety about joining the rest of the clan. It’s only when she spots the scarecrow on her childhood home’s property that Diana gets her bearings (“How can I get lost where I used to play?” she muses), the first of many indications that the princess longs for the simpler days of her youth.

Once at the estate, Diana is met with a chilly reception, and audiences with on-the-nose dialogue. “It’s always cold in here,” she complains to her young boys, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), the only two people who actually seem happy to see her. Charles is nowhere to be found and Major Alistar Gregory (Timothy Spall), who’s been brought in to keep the swarming press at bay, seems none too pleased with her tardiness.

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Larraín presents Diana as a woman keenly aware of the cage in which she’s been trapped from a young age. When the blinds in her bedroom are shut to shield her from the paparazzi, the grand English manor suddenly feels like a prison. The moment, like many in Spencer, readily conjures a paranoia-suffused atmosphere of fear for what might happen at any moment.

The film’s choice of title by itself promises the unvarnished truth about the real Princess of Wales, one made to cut through the noise. But Larraín, who made a name for himself beginning with Tony Manero as a nervy chronicler of the social horrors of Pinochet’s Chile, is an expert at playing truth for dramatic effect. As he did in Jackie, Larraín focuses so tightly on his main character, and to such claustrophobic effect, that it never feels less than subjective and impressionistic as the Princess of Wales roams the cavernous hallways and bedrooms of Sandringham Estate, desperate to avoid contact with the rest of the guests.

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Spencer is haunted by doom, and it almost takes on the tenor of a fright flick once the celebrations get into full swing. Finding a conspicuously placed book on Anne Boleyn in her bedroom upon her arrival, Diana starts seeing visions of the beheaded queen (Amy Manson) following her around the estate. With Camilla Parker Bowles (Emma Darwall-Smith) also milling about with her eye unsubtly on Charles, Diana reverts to an almost childlike state, defying the royal family’s strict holiday schedule and making off-color remarks to her put-upon maids. Eventually, she makes her way to her dilapidated former childhood home in the night, tiptoeing across the hazardous floorboards in a beautiful evening gown while memories of her past hauntingly materialize around her. “Here, there is no future,” Diana tells her children earlier in the film, “and past and present are the same thing.”

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As Diana’s descent into a kind of madness begins to suggest that Larraín is whipping up an homage to Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, it can feel as if he’s too gleefully indulging his real-life subject’s well-documented and scrutinized struggles with mental health. There’s a tinge of exploitation to a scene in which an especially fragile Diana, late for Christmas dinner, paces the hallways and screams over and over to the maid trailing behind her: “Tell them I’m not well!” In real life, Diana admitted to harming herself, and Spencer shows her doing so, but by shoehorning such moments into what largely plays out as a fictionalized impression of the princess’s life, they’re more like cheap shocks than trenchant cries for help.

Yet it’s a testament to Stewart’s empathetic performance that such qualms almost feel irrelevant. Her embodiment of Diana is less an act of imitation than one of inspiration and connection, and she neither flaunts her process nor invites our pity for the princess. Given Stewart’s own contentious relationship with the press—namely the way that she bore the brunt of a well-publicized cheating scandal—you never doubt her understanding of the mounting pressure that Diana faced to act in a way that wouldn’t ruffle any feathers.

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“I’m a magnet for madness,” Diana declares at one point, “Other people’s madness.” Larraín’s exploration of the royal family’s stifling ways illustrates this impression as a Grand Guignol spectacular, showing that Diana only knew how to find freedom by escaping into her past. Bleak, though, as her emotional and psychological act of retreat may be, a light on the horizon pierces through it. In a scene late in the film that will, for audiences, feel like an all too apt release from the vice-like grip of Larraín’s aesthetics, Diana’s loyal maid and friend, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), gets her to again consider the possibilities of what love and life can be. Ending on an ecstatic sigh of relief from Diana as she finds a measure of peace, Spencer makes us forget that further tragedy awaits the Princess of Wales, allowing us to take solace in the fact that she managed to find, if only for a brief amount of time, some level of real happiness.

Score: 
 Cast: Kristen Stewart, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Jack Farthing, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Stella Gonet, Richard Sammel, Elizabeth Berrington, Lore Stefanek, Amy Manson  Director: Pablo Larraín  Screenwriter: Steven Knight  Distributor: Neon  Running Time: 111 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video, Soundtrack

Mark Hanson

Mark Hanson is a film writer and curator from Toronto, Canada, and the product manager at Bay Street Video, one of North America's last remaining video stores.

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