Spencer’s review: Kristin Stewart’s Princess Di movie is a spooky ghost story

This review of Spencer is from the screening of the film at the 2021 Toronto International Film Festival. Stay tuned for more information when the film releases in November 2021.

The biopic on Princess Diana Spencer is not your prototype biopic. Then again, the film’s director, Chilean author Pablo Larraín, is also not known for making familiar biopics. His depictions of the life of Jackie Kennedy after the assassination of John F. Kennedy in Jackie, and poet Pablo Neruda on the run from new Chilean president Gabriel González Videla in Neruda, are raw and flawless films that closely focus on a specific moment in the life of their subjects.

Likewise with Spencer, Larraín does not provide the expected story of Princess Diana. There is no courtship or fairytale wedding, at the The crown. It does not trace his life as a newborn baby destined for greater heights. It doesn’t see her as a doomed victim, either. Instead of, Spencer takes place over a Christmas weekend in 1991, in the Queen’s Sandringham Estate. Diana (Kristen Stewart) is still in a rough marriage with Prince Charles (a cold Jack Farthing), or at least partially. While there, Diana confronts her role as a mother to her two sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), and grapples with her eating disorder, her family history and the domineering men who script his daily life.

Opening with a title card saying “A Fable from a True Story,” Larraín’s film is not based on an entirely true event. He also doesn’t want to tell Diana’s life story. Spencer is an act of psychological horror, a sort of ghost story and survival image carried by a strangely immersive Kristen Stewart, in the best performance of her career.

Stephen Knight’s screenplay doesn’t strike viewers over the top with the media-constructed People’s Princess myth. Knight and Larraín are too smart to use such simple tools. Instead, they find more subtle ways to weave its legend into a realistic narrative. Spencer opens with Diana, without a driver or bodyguard, going to Sandringham House. The confident royal gets lost, finally deciding to stop to ask for directions. In front of normal people, she assumes a timid and somewhat vulnerable disposition. His eyes turn to the sky as his head tilts to the side. The scene is the first outline of Stewart’s layered portrayal: the differences between the private princess and the one facing the audience.

This is a biopic deeply concerned with analyzing the psychology of Diana, and more specifically of her many demons. But not in a salacious way. As she heads towards Sandringham Estate, she sees a scarecrow standing in the middle of a field, wearing her father’s red coat. (In real life, her father, John Spencer, died three months after this Christmas of a heart attack.) She goes to retrieve the outer clothes, hoping to have them cleaned. Diana grew up on the Queen’s Estate at Park House, making her journey to the Christmas festivities both a heartwarming return and an unhappy duty, causing a source of grief that affects her in different ways.

Diana also connects with her ancestry in the film. Equerry Major Gregory (a punchable Timothy Spall), a craggy Scottish war veteran who now fights for the Queen, harasses Diana into keeping up with lore. A ‘game’ has visitors weigh in at the start upon arrival, to see who gains the most weight during the holidays. This tradition causes Diana’s insecurities with her weight to come to the surface. And after finding a book about Anne Boleyn on her bed, possibly placed there by Major Gregory, she dreams of the distant relative, Henry VIII’s second wife, who was beheaded after he falsely accused her. adultery. Between the mantle and the spirit of Anne Boleyn, Diana is drawn to her now doomed childhood home.

Who can blame Diana for feeling locked in? Other than her tailor and best friend Maggie (Sally Hawkins) and the friendly Estate Manager Darren (Sean Harris), she is quite isolated. But again, Larraín is too smart to limit Spencer to refine Diana’s relationship with the other royals around her, or even her relationship with Charles and his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles. Instead, he focuses on describing how Diana tries to protect her sons from the archaic and closed traditions of the royal family. But in the face of bossy men like Charles and Major Gregory, along with the estate’s inflexible protocol and eating disorder, she can barely protect herself. The mania she feels makes her Christmas vacation more of a struggle for survival than a getaway.

Jonny Greenwood’s score opens in classic British style, then turns into a baffling symphony. Following an aesthetic similar to Jackie, the director of photography Claire Mathon (Atlantic, Portrait of a Lady on Fire) captures Diana with intrusive close-ups, her lens scanning the princess’s heart-wrenching facial expressions. Mathon is also keenly interested in the hallmarks of a disturbing estate manicure: the uniform garden, the demanding movements of the austere servants, and the meticulously prepared food and clothing, which contrast with Diana’s free fall. Meanwhile, legendary Jacqueline Durran’s costume work covers the biggest hits of Diana’s best-known outfits, with an evocative array of fashions that often speak to her mental state.

But Stewart’s absolutely outstanding performance is what brings Diana’s traditions and Larraín’s conception of her together, creating a fleshed out version of the princess that doesn’t rely on broad or gaudy instincts. Stewart folds back into her body to refresh Diana’s nervousness, nods her head in a familiar fashion, and gets the perfect princess voice. But beyond that, his performance comes down to the eyes. Stewart’s eyes swing like locks in the grass. And each look makes another victim, displaying either some sort of desperation or shyness, depending on the situation. It is her eyes that make her cross the line of performance to a totally lived aura. There’s never a time when it’s Kristen Stewart as Diana. She is Diane.

The film has two climaxes, and one comes when Diana finally returns to her childhood home. She’s frantic and mind-blowing, and Mathon’s camera closes even more dangerously on her. It’s here that Jackie editor Sebastián Sepúlveda shines, offering a vivid and haunting montage of her life that preceded her. The other climax takes the tenor of the film from dark to festive. Given the film’s gloom and depth of desperation, the swift outcome to the revelry should feel tearful, almost as if Larraín was cheating on the story. But it works, because the director knows audiences have an inherent desire for Diana to have a happy ending.

In this sense, Larraín Spencer, an inspired portrayal of the life of the princess who is more concerned with discovering new truths in her public and private personality than following the familiar rhythms of her life, is not the classic biopic that audiences are used to watching. But it is the inventive and iconoclastic film that Diana deserves.

Spencer arrives in US theaters on November 5, 2021.