Review: Spencer (2021)

Spencer is not a tasteful biopic. You need to understand this off the top to appreciate what the film is doing. Yes, Pablo Larraín’s film is about Princess Diana (played by Kristen Stewart in full Oscar-transformation mode) and, yes, it involves actors playing real members of the Royal Family over Christmas at Sandringham House in 1991. However, the purpose of the film is not to accurately convey the biographical details of Diana’s life or boil down her story to an appealing Hollywood narrative. This isn’t The Crown. Instead, Spencer uses the enormous weight of Diana’s popularity and tragic death to conjure an overwhelming atmosphere of dread—to make us feel what she feels, experience the suffocating atmosphere of life among the royals the way she does. It’s an experiential film, which makes sense considering that it’s essentially a psychological horror film.

Larraín apparently did a similar thing with Jackie (it remains, as of yet, unseen by me), and he’s known for portraying key historical events in hyper-stylized ways. His breakthrough feature, 2012’s No, about the 1988 Chilean plebiscite for keeping Pinochet in power, was shot on videotape to mimic the television advertisements at the centre of the “no” campaign, marrying the commercial style with the actual historical record. So, such overt stylization isn’t anything new for him. That being said, him working with Steven Knight, easily one of the boldest screenwriters working in Hollywood today, takes it to a whole other level. 

This film is awash in metaphors, allusions, arch performances, and archer visual compositions. It never settles onto one way to look at Diana or one metaphor to describe her—she’s directly compared to or presented as currency, clothes, animals, and food, among other things, at various points in the film. The film says again and again that the experience of being Diana was a maelstrom of anxiety that likely would have swallowed any individual. If it works for you, it really works. I can imagine it might come across as pretentious slop for some viewers. To each their own when encountering a work of art that is defiantly not trying to be reality, but is trying to say something profound about reality.

The easiest comparisons come in the form of horror films: primarily, Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining and Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby. Kubrick’s horror masterpiece inspires the visual style. Larraín and cinematographer Claire Mathon have the camera glide through Sandringham House like it’s the Overlook Hotel. They stalk Diana down opulent corridors with steadicam shots, frame her as constantly surrounded and probed by the skeptical eyes of the royal staff (especially Timothy Spall’s Equerry Major Alistair Gregory, a stand-in for David Walker), and play with extreme narrow focus in close-ups to capture the subjective madness. The presence of a ghost—yes, you read that correctly—bolsters the haunted atmosphere.

As for Polanski’s film, Spencer shares with it a totalizing atmosphere of feminine anxiety. Both films are about a woman being told what her reality is and how she should feel about it despite ample evidence to suggest she should think and feel the opposite. Everyone except Diana’s children and a couple friendly servants (Sean Harris’s head chef and Sally Hawkins’s royal dresser) treat her as another item to be made up, arranged, and trotted out to perform one function or another, say empty words, give empty smiles, play a role, and an inhuman one at that, like a doll or a statue. Whenever she expresses discomfort, they tell her, oh no, that’s not what you’re feeling, you just need some help in doing what’s right, looking the right way, eating the right dish, following the royal code. Jonny Greenwood’s hypnotic score, which recalls both his previous work for Paul Thomas Anderson and avant-garde discordant jazz, heightens the claustrophobia and makes Diana’s anxiety a palpable throughline even when she’s not on screen (which is almost never).

None of this stylized filmmaking would matter much if Kristen Stewart wasn’t exceptional in the lead. She doesn’t look much like the real Diana (she wears the clothes well and carries herself similarly, but she’s not a dead ringer), nor does she sound much like the real Diana (her British accent is fine, but it’s clearly studied), but that doesn’t matter much. This film isn’t really about the real Diana—even as much as any biopic possibly could be about the real person at its centre—but our conception of Diana and the enormous weight that would’ve borne down on any person having to suffer through such things. 

After 30 minutes, you forget you’re watching Stewart as you become absorbed in her performance and the immersive presentation of the film. Stewart has a rhythmic cadence to her line deliveries—words either struggle to come out or pour out like a tune, often one followed by the other. But more than the lines, it’s how she holds herself that makes the performance so noteworthy. How she always fails to hide the tension in her shoulders or lets her eyes betray her disgust. A shot of her talking to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) from across a pool table captures the brilliant discomfort of her performance: she stands erect and speaks with courage, but her hands writhe and twitch and push into the table with agonising shakiness, betraying her true feelings. It’s a remarkable and noteworthily bit of physical acting.

If Spencer were a straight biopic, it’d probably be tasteful and well performed, but I’m not sure it’d be memorable. You could just as well watch season four of The Crown if you wanted a high-budget costume drama played straight. For me, facts about the lives of the royals are not of much interest, but the experience of the royals as human beings is fascinating because it’s so artificial and unfamiliar to the rest of us. Larraín’s film translates that artificiality into a claustrophobic work of psychological horror. It’s not so much a film about Diana as an exorcism of her demons, which, in the process, shows how Diana and her suffering continues to haunt us all these years later.

8 out of 10

Spencer (2021, UK/USA/Germany/Chile)

Directed by Pablo Larraín; written by Steven Knight; starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry.

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