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‘Spencer’ Review: Kristen Stewart Transforms in Pablo Larraín’s Masterly Princess Diana Movie

The director of "Jackie" has made an enthralling drama of Diana's moment of truth and transition.

By Owen Gleiberman

Owen Gleiberman

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And here’s the beauty part: Right off, we feel as if we’re seeing… Diana . The real thing. Kristen Stewart doesn’t just do an impersonation (though on the level of impersonation she’s superb). She transforms; she changes her aspect, her rhythm, her karma. Watching her play Diana, we see an echo, perhaps, of Stewart’s own ambivalent relationship to stardom — the way that she’ll stand on an awards podium, chewing her lip, reveling in the attention even as she’s slightly uncomfortable with it (and even as she makes that distrust of the limelight a key element of her stardom). Mostly, though, what we see in Stewart’s Diana is a woman of homegrown elegance, with a luminosity that pours out of her, except that part of her is now driven to crush that radiance, because her life has become a wreck.

“Spencer” is a movie made very much in the spirit of Larraín’s “Jackie,” the 2016 drama in which Natalie Portman brilliantly portrayed Jackie Kennedy during the week following the JFK assassination. I thought “Jackie” was a knockout, and “Spencer,” which also finds its heroine living through a fateful moment of truth and transition, is every bit as good; it may be even better. The entire film is set over the Christmas holiday, about 10 years after the 1981 wedding of Diana and Prince Charles, and it takes the form of a you are-there voyeuristic diary of what Diana was going through as she came to realize that her disenchantment with her life had become defining, consuming.

In the movie, we see a princess, a woman of power and true majesty, who is treated like a child. Major Gregory, played by a disarmingly gaunt and severe-looking Timothy Spall, has been brought onto the premises to keep an eye on her, and his watchful gaze makes her feel like a pinned insect. And Diana’s lady-in-waiting, Maggie (Sally Hawkins), is her one trusted confidante — but for that very reason, Maggie gets sent away. There can be no secrets. And there are none. At Sandringham, the walls have ears.

“Spencer” is an intimate speculative drama that stays as close as it can to everything we know about Diana. At the same time, the movie is infused with a poetic extravagance. The remarkable production design, by Guy Hendrix Dyas, turns the interiors of Sandringham into a profusion of textures that dance before our eyes — the patterned curtains and gilded wallpaper, the carved paneling, the warm light of the chandeliers, the paintings and upholstery and mirrors and knickknacks. And Jonny Greenwood’s ominous jazzy score seems to have a direct pipeline to Diana’s emotions. Larraín places Di in this luxe getaway palace as if he were making a royal version of “The Shining,” though part of what’s bracing about the movie is that the members of the royal family have come to think it’s Diana who’s the monster. They regard the attention she receives as a threat to who they are, and they’re right. What they’re in denial of is that the media is creating a new world that’s going to squeeze them out.

Yes, she has wealth, comfort, privilege, fame. But life within the gilded cage of the royal family is also stifling. As she explains to her sons, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), that’s because it’s a life that makes time stand still. “Here,” she says, “there is only one tense. There is no future. Past and present are the same thing.” What she’s talking about is an existence in which “tradition” is code for what has been, and what always will be. (It’s code for a very British kind of control.) There is no room for anything that isn’t tradition. The film presents Diana’s bulimia with disarming frankness (it’s an open secret that even Charles makes scornful reference to), but part of the drama of how it’s portrayed is that it’s not just an “eating disorder.” It’s Diana’s way of rejecting the food porn that’s part of what the royals use to numb themselves.

As “Spencer” presents it, Diana is trapped in a loveless marriage to a diffident stick of a man who openly betrays her. Not an uncommon situation. But since she’s one of the royals, she cannot leave him (or so she thinks). She’s effectively imprisoned. She knows she’s supposed to wear the gorgeous pearl necklace that Charles got her, but he also got the same necklace for her — for his mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles (who we glimpse outside the church on Christmas morning; she gives Diana a grin of malice). He did it thoughtlessly, not even realizing that anyone would notice. (Unlike Diana, he’s got a pre-media mind.) In her bedroom at the mansion, Diana finds a biography of Anne Boleyn, the wife that Henry VIII accused of adultery and beheaded so that he could marry someone else, and she begins to feel Boleyn as a kindred spirit. Larraín stages a remarkable dinner scene in which Diana takes in the stares of Charles, the Queen, and others who have begun to register that she’s “cracking up.” Their attitude is: How do you solve a problem like Diana? But Diana grabs the pearls around her neck as if the necklace itself were about to execute her. Those pearls are killing her softly.

How will Diana escape? For most of the movie, she has no idea that she can. But an encounter with a scarecrow, nicknamed Bertie, that she remembers from her youth, when she was Diana Spencer, sets off something in her. She goes to visit her old house, which is all boarded up, and she realizes that she was more of herself back then than she is now. That said, in all the conflicts she has with Charles, who is played by Jack Farthing as a man of brutal limitation, there’s one that she’s driven not to compromise on: She does not want her sons to become part of their father’s pheasant-hunting brigade. She says it’s dangerous. She’s right, but the real problem is what she won’t say: that she feels like she’s one of the pheasants, and that the habit of hunting , and the way that it’s linked to the royals’ tradition of “military” discipline (though a real soldier doesn’t get his prey paraded right in front of him), incarnates everything that’s wrong with them.

So the day after Christmas, she drives out to the hunting ground, desperate and defiant, and she becomes that scarecrow. Skewing her arms up in the air, Diana demands that her sons stop hunting. And Stewart makes that the most moving moment I’ve seen in any film this year. Diana isn’t speaking as a royal. She’s speaking as a mother — as the woman she will now be. How will she do it? As the pop song that plays thrillingly during the following sequence tells us, all she needs is a miracle (and maybe a little fast food). She will still be “Diana.” But now she will be herself.

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (In Competition), Sept. 3, 2021. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 111 MIN.

Production: A NEON/Topic Studios release of a Komplizen Film, Fabula, Shoebox Films production, in association with FilmNation Entertainment. Executive producers: Steven Knight, Tom Quinn, Jeff Deutchman, Christina Zisa, Maria Zuckerman, Ryan Heller, Michael Bloom, Ben Von Dobeneck, Sarah Nagel, Isabell Wigand.
Crew: Director: Pablo Larraín. Screenplay: Steven Knight. Camera: Claire Mathin. Editor: Sebastián Sepúlveda. Music: Jonny Greenwood.
With: Kristen Stewart, Sally Hawkins, Timothy Spall, Sean Harris, Jack Farthing, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Stella Gonet, Richard Sammel, Elizabeth Berrington, Lore Stefanek, Amy Manson.

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In 'Spencer,' Kristen Stewart's Princess Diana grasps for reality in order to survive

Linda Holmes

Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life. Pablo Larraín/Neon hide caption

Kristen Stewart plays Diana in a very different vision of an imagined moment in her life.

Pablo Larraín's Spencer opens with a label that reads, "A fable from a true tragedy." The tragedy, of course, is the story of Diana Spencer, who became Princess of Wales, went through a bitter and public divorce, was largely beloved nevertheless, and lived a short life — at 36, she was literally chased to her death. The fable, on the other hand, is an imagining of a Christmas weekend in the early '90s when her children were young, when a separated but not yet divorced Diana realizes the depth of her own despair and decides to pursue her freedom.

It seems only fair that a woman like Diana, so eagerly drawn by pop culture and so damaged by the ravenous interest in her, would get a chance to be seen through different cinematic lenses. The stage musical about her life that recently debuted on Netflix fails in part because it feels devoid of ideas and perspective, like a filmed Wikipedia page that runs down a checklist of events in her life. Spencer , instead, makes the reasonable assumption that the vast majority of its audience already knows how Diana fit into the family, how she was publicly perceived, how she died, how she was treated. Details are not fussed over or explained: Camilla Parker-Bowles looms large over this story but is not named, because Larraín and Knight assume you know her, you know at least the vague outlines of her history with Charles, and you know how things turned out.

Picture This

A father's day gift from meghan to harry is now a kids' book.

The most obvious precursor to Spencer is Larraín's Jackie , which also studied a few crucial days in the life of one of the world's most famous women: in that case, young Jackie Kennedy in the aftermath of the death of her husband. But while the films share a fondness for footage of women who feel and look lost in enormous, grand spaces, Spencer -- written by Steven Knight — is far less bounded by efforts to be faithful to, or even recreate, reality. Even if Jackie faithfully recreates reality mostly in order to imbue it with unexpected elements of horror or irony (as when Kennedy wanders around hearing "Camelot"), it is careful to make Natalie Portman sound precisely like Kennedy and to have its footage of the White House Christmas tour look precisely as it actually did. It also adopts quite a conventional structure and framing device in the form of a journalist coming to interview Kennedy about these events later.

Spencer is, from that opening title, much more unconventional and almost entirely uninterested in the historical accuracy of any of its details; it is intentionally not real, intentionally a "fable." Other than the roughest outlines of Diana's marriage and the cast of royals who surround her, there's little reason to believe this story is literally true; it is instead meant to feel true, to say something true, and to change the angle through which Diana is seen, from a storybook princess to something closer to a Gothic horror heroine struggling to hang on to her grip on reality as her world tilts. And rather than the interview conceit that Jackie is built around, Spencer opens with a long, beautifully shot, and initially baffling sequence that communicates just how disconnected from a regular person's reality Diana's Christmas weekend is actually going to be.

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Reality begins to tilt.

We meet Diana, played beautifully by Kristen Stewart, as she drives herself to the Sandringham estate where the royal festivities happen every year. She gets lost and is therefore late, and arriving after the Queen means that she begins the weekend already having erred, already being — as she sees it — in trouble. Confronted with scales on which she must be weighed at the beginning and end of the weekend, offered a series of pre-selected outfits she's meant to wear for everything from meals to church trips, Diana feels not merely micromanaged and limited, but instantly choked by her surroundings, even as she finds refuge in the company of her children.

'Diana, The Musical' mixes camp with sincerity. Here's where every song ranks

But what begins as a straightforward drama begins to tilt as Diana struggles with an eating disorder, a habit of self-harm, and paranoia that the film plays with. Initially this paranoia seems unreasonable, but eventually it seems like it might just be common sense. One of the men who works for the Queen, played by Timothy Spall, is a terrifyingly cold figure who seems to be everywhere at once, and who could have walked directly out of a horror novel that will eventually reveal that he maintains a torture room.

The dread around the story only grows, especially when Diana finds that someone has left a book about Anne Boleyn in her room. She sees parallels between herself and another royal wife who fell out of favor, and clings to her only friend, a dresser named Maggie, played by Sally Hawkins. Maggie's presence and absence affect Diana's sense of safety, both physically and emotionally.

Seeing a different Princess

Diana has so often been seen in popular culture as either a perfect princess or a tragic victim; here, she is a woman trying to be proactive in her own survival, much like the "final girl" in any horror film must be. And while the other royals do speak — there is one fascinating scene between Charles and Diana that beautifully positions them as strategic opponents — they don't do so very often. They mostly hover, they move in and out of frame, and they are often out of focus and effectively anonymous on an individual level. Their personhood isn't terribly relevant to Diana by this point in her life; they exist as monsters, or at least as threats. They play the role of ghosts or whistling winds here, more than as characters with whom she interacts.

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It's not even just Gothic horror that Larraín seems to be referencing, though; echoes shift throughout. There is — and honestly, there also was in Jackie — a bit of The Shining , here in the way Diana seems at times to be lost in the long corridors of the house, seeing things that might not actually be there, feeling that her mere presence is sapping her of sanity. There's some of the stiffness of upstairs-downstairs royal tales. There's even a bit of the '70s paranoid thriller and the '90s trenchcoat thriller: Spall is part horror, yes, but he's also part ominous company man, like the one who lingers at the edges of most John Grisham books, making grave pronouncements about what might happen to those who go against power. A scene in which he warns Diana while out on the grounds of the estate looks a lot like scenes in which FBI agents or mysterious operatives walk around the National Mall with their collars pulled up, telling people not to talk.

The design does great work here — the grand halls, the spooky beauty, the dated outfits and familiar dresses — as does the score from Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood. Greenwood is a prolific film composer, and has a particularly deft touch with what might be called the grandly unsettling: The Master, There Will Be Blood , and particularly Phantom Thread , for which he earned an Oscar nomination. The score is sometimes traditionally orchestral, sometimes discordant and creepy, and smart about touches like jazz-inflected horns that instantly shift the mood.

Kristen Stewart's Diana

While her take on Diana's voice rang true enough to my American ear, Stewart wisely doesn't spend a lot of time physically recreating Diana with precision — with one exception. Early on, when Diana is lost, she stops at a small café to ask for directions. As she walks through the crowd, which recognizes her and stares in silent awe, Stewart briefly casts her eyes down at the floor and smiles just a bit. That moment is so very reminiscent of the real Diana that it creates a bond between actor and real person that survives even the most reality-bending moments in the story.

Her performance here is powerful, and it carries this version of Diana through such instability as a character (is she right to be afraid? is she losing her grip on reality?), but she always seems like the same person, the same good mother who doesn't know how to begin to separate herself from the life she's walked into. She is asked to do big things, grand things, genre horror things, but she never tips over into caricature.

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The obvious question about any Diana project at this point is whether it has anything to add to the massive amount of cultural material about her that already exists. By the end of her life, she had told her own story in her own words quite a bit. But the point of Spencer seems to be not to reveal Diana the real person, but to treat her differently in a cinematic sense — to recast her in a different kind of movie than the ones that we've already seen. And, perhaps ironically, to use horror to imagine an ending for her that's less horrifying.

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Pablo Larraín ’s “Spencer” is a haunting reimagining of a tense Christmas holiday in the life of Princess Diana. Knowing this will not fully prepare you for what you’re about to watch. Larraín’s vision is full of dream sequences, internal and externalized pain, metaphor-heavy dialogue, and Kristen Stewart brooding sensationally under various hats and Diana’s signature short bob haircut. The movie aims to place the audience in its heroine’s state of mind as much as it wants to capture the sense of time of the early '90s and that point in the royal relationship when things begin to disintegrate.

Written by Steven Knight , “Spencer” greets its audience with a word: “A fable from a true tragedy,” setting the tone that what we’re about to see is more fiction than fact. Princess Diana (Stewart) is late to the beginning of holiday festivities. She gets lost in the area where she grew up as neighbors to the royal family, a symbol of how she’s lost parts of herself over the years trying to live up to expectations. Once on royal grounds, she’s greeted by a stern-faced former military officer ( Timothy Spall ), who’s the eyes and ears of the family. There’s nothing she can do without his knowledge. Now reunited with her boys William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), Diana tries to put on a brave face even if she knows her husband Prince Charles ( Jack Farthing ) is having an affair. Her anxiety and depression start to get the better of her. She begins to see the ghost of Anne Boleyn ( Amy Manson ), the one-time wife of Henry the VIII who was beheaded so her husband could marry his mistress, as an omen for what will be done to her. Diana finds an ally among her staff in Maggie ( Sally Hawkins ), but even she is pulled away just when Diana needs her the most. Robbed of her privacy outside and inside the opulent estate, the walls feel as if they were closing in on Diana as she loses her grip on reality until she can break out and save herself.

As of late, Larraín seems fascinated by women held captive by societal cages and how they find an escape route. There was Natalie Portman ’s tear and bloodstained performance as the First Lady in “ Jackie ” back in 2016. Then, most recently, his sexually-charged drama “ Ema ” found a street dancer breaking with convention, polite society and her choreographer turned controlling romantic partner. “Spencer” shares a lot with “Jackie,” namely the stifling demands made on famous women in designer clothes and grand homes. They may appear to the outside world as having it all, but the reality is much sadder: their cages are gilded, but still a cage.

The latest addition to that cage is Kristen Stewart as a moody Diana, a performance that will likely be divisive among the princess’ defenders. The accent feels hit or miss, as do some of her actions. At times, it seems as if the movie reduces her to a childish state, throwing a fit after being denied her choices to do much else. Knight’s dialogue may be at times blunt and surface-level, and too often doesn’t give Stewart enough much room for nuance. Much of her performance can be described as a doomed brooding or a royal “ Melancholia ,” unable to pull herself out of that state until she finds a way out of the royals’ clutches.

Larraín’s vision isn’t a straightforward interpretation of the princess’s displeasure with traditions and holiday pageantry. There are sequences with Anne Boleyn that come across pretty heavy-handed, but perhaps the audience’s first hint that this is not your typical biopic is during the first dinner, when a displeased Diana is sickened by the pearls she’s forced to wear by her husband—a set of pearls she knows was also given to his mistress—so she snaps the necklace, sending the pearls all around her, including into her pea soup. Then she proceeds to eat one of the pearls, cracking them painfully with her teeth before the next shot of her running away in pain. Now, the imagined eating of the pearls can be interpreted a number of ways, but the pain of suffering through a dinner with her cheating husband across the table does physically affect her. The blending of her anguish, real and imagined, is intended to keep the audience uneasy and it succeeds.

In order to immerse the audience in Diana’s dissolving mental state, Larraín enlisted composer Jonny Greenwood to create the increasingly unnerving soundtrack, which includes everything from high-pitched strings to the clinking of glass chimes, to demonstrate Diana’s overwhelming experience. Cinematographer extraordinaire Claire Mathon (“ Portrait of a Lady on Fire ,” “ Atlantics ”) recreates a somewhat-faded look of photographs from the era, visually matching the scenery and costumes.

Near the end of the movie, a fashion flashback revisits Diana in earlier days of her youth, in some of her most famous outfits, like her wedding gown. This sequence happens after her having been denied going back to her childhood home. She goes anyway and looks at the ruins of her lost girlhood. It is a dizzying moment, created by Larraín and Mathon to look like a fashion shoot out of a cadre of outfits designed by Jacqueline Durran . Guy Hendrix Dyas ’ production design of the royal’s holiday home is the most literal interpretation of Larraín’s idea of a gilded cage. It is rich in detail and steeped in grandiosity. Yet when Diana and her boys complain it’s cold, no one dares turn the heat up to accommodate their requests. It’s just another metaphor in this decadent fairy tale inspired by the public’s ongoing fascination with a woman who never had much time in life to enjoy her days outside of her gilded cage.

This review was filed in conjunction with the Telluride Film Festival on September 5th. It is now exclusively in theaters.

Monica Castillo

Monica Castillo is a critic, journalist, programmer, and curator based in New York City. She is the Senior Film Programmer at the Jacob Burns Film Center and a contributor to RogerEbert.com .

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Spencer (2021)

111 minutes

Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana

Sean Harris as Chief Darren

Jack Farthing as Prince Charles

Sally Hawkins as Maggie

Timothy Spall as Major Gregory

Amy Manson as Anne Boleyn

Pablo Larraín
Steven Knight

Cinematographer

Claire Mathon
Sebastián Sepúlveda
Jonny Greenwood

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Critics Consensus

Spencer can frustrate with its idiosyncratic depiction of its subject's life, but Kristen Stewart's finely modulated performance anchors the film's flights of fancy. Read critic reviews

Audience Says

Kristen Stewart is great in Spencer , but viewers expecting a traditional -- or even clear -- picture of Diana's life are likely to come away disappointed. Read audience reviews

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Spencer videos, spencer photos.

The marriage of Princess Diana and Prince Charles has long since grown cold. Though rumors of affairs and a divorce abound, peace is ordained for the Christmas festivities at the Queen's Sandringham Estate. There's eating and drinking, shooting and hunting. Diana knows the game. But this year, things will be profoundly different. SPENCER is an imagining of what might have happened during those few fateful days.

Rating: R (Some Language)

Genre: Biography, Drama

Original Language: English

Director: Pablo Larraín

Producer: Maren Ade , Jonas Dornbach , Janine Jackowski , Juan de Dios Larraín , Pablo Larraín , Paul Webster

Writer: Steven Knight

Release Date (Theaters): Nov 5, 2021 wide

Release Date (Streaming): Nov 23, 2021

Box Office (Gross USA): $7.1M

Runtime: 1h 51m

Distributor: Neon

Production Co: FilmNation Entertainment, Komplizen Film, Shoebox Films, Fabula

Sound Mix: Dolby Digital

Cast & Crew

Kristen Stewart

Sally Hawkins

Timothy Spall

Major Alistar Gregory

Sean Harris

Jack Farthing

Jack Nielen

Freddie Spry

Stella Gonet

Richard Sammel

Prince Philip

Elizabeth Berrington

Princess Anne

Lore Stefanek

Queen Mother

Anne Boleyn

Pablo Larraín

Steven Knight

Screenwriter

Jonas Dornbach

Janine Jackowski

Juan de Dios Larraín

Paul Webster

Executive Producer

Jeff Deutchman

Christina Zisa

Maria Zuckerman

Ryan Heller

Michael Bloom

Sarah Nagel

Claire Mathon

Cinematographer

Sebastián Sepúlveda

Film Editor

Jonny Greenwood

Original Music

Guy Hendrix Dyas

Production Design

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Critic Reviews for Spencer

Audience reviews for spencer.

The screenplay seems like it was written to be a more traditional biopic, but Larraín made it so utterly strange I found myself mostly liking it. Even the silly material (the ripping of the pearls, the casual arrival of Ann Boleyn's ghost etc.) generally works or at least never comes off too embarrassing. Also, this is easily Stewart's best performance so far.

This will most certainly not be most people's overly self-indulgent cup of tea. However, between the intricate sets and the beautiful scenery, some great writing around a captivating story, and a fantastically gritty score that perfectly complements the frenetic mood impelled by Kristen Stewart's unique portrayal of Diana, Spencer will leave a taste that some will thoroughly enjoy.

Films of this nature usually aren't all that appealing to me. A character study set in the past with a lot of long sequences of characters talking about things I'm very unfamiliar with usually doesn't click in my mind unless it feels different. Spencer is the prime example of a film like this that surprisingly really worked for me. Having known the basic details of the story and having at least a brief understanding of this family's history, I was at least intrigued to give it a watch. I must say, the slow pace of this film will not work for others, but I found that all the filmmaking aspects, along with the performances, are truly what kept my eyes on the screen. There isn't much to give away about this story here. Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) is very unhappy with the fact that she will one day become the Queen. She desperately wants out of this life and the perfection of it all. Resorting to the physical harm of herself due to her confinement with no way out, this film dives deep into the mental state of this real-life figure in the 1990s. A film that relies solely on a performance can easily crumble if the outcome isn't great, but I can gladly say that this is the best performance Kristen Stewart has ever given and may ever give in her career. Beginning in films like Panic Room as a child and eventually breaking out in the franchise everyone knows, Twilight, I could never put my finger on why her performances just weren't working for me. Films like Into the Wild or The Runaways gave her some nice material to work with, but nothing ever jumped out at me that she could be amazing. Well… when the film Happiest Season came out last year, I began to second guess myself. She was capable of delivering a very, very good performance in that film and now with Spencer, she has proven that she has grown as an actress. There were multiple scenes where I forgot I watch watching Kristen Stewart and I don't say that about many performances. I can usually always tell or get distracted by who is on-screen. Although taking place in the 90s, Spencer still looked to me like it would feel like a period piece set in the 60s or 70s, but I was very wrong. The very fact that the grainy look over the entire film made it look like a movie that was made in the 90s, but with a much crisper image and wonderful cinematography. Even though there is a lot of good in this film, the cinematography was the largest standout to me. The way the camera captured the openness of the world around Diana, while still making the film feel confined with the excessive amounts of close-ups (in a good way), I was glued to the screen. I never thought a film like this would grab my attention as it did. Overall, Spencer isn't going to be one of my absolute favourite films of the year, but I honestly think that's just because these types of movies don't appeal to me all that much. With that said, I have to admit that it's a very well-made film. It made sense to me when I noticed that director Pablo Larraín, who directed this film, also directed the film, Jackie, back in 2016. They are very similar in feel, but I think everything about Spencer is an improvement over that film. I can see many people finding this film boring, as not much happens, but it really came down to the look of the film, the fantastic central performance, and dialogue that surprisingly hooked me. It's now playing in select theatres and available on-demand.

People have been fascinated by Princess Diana since her storybook ascent from ordinary woman to being princess of England. Her 1981 wedding was watched by over 750 million people worldwide. It seemed like a dream come true, a childhood wish to be chosen from obscurity by a prince and elevated into a privileged world of wealth and power. Except Diana Spencer's real experiences were far from a dream. Prince Charles continued seeing his real beloved, Camilla Parker Bowles, a divorced woman that the royal family had (allegedly) forbidden Charles from marrying. Diana pushed back against the overbearing influence of her powerful in-laws until her tragic end in 1997 fleeing from paparazzi in pursuit. She was a figure of fascination, idealization, and pity, and the question always remained how well anyone ever truly knew this woman on her terms. Enter Chilean director Pablo Larrain, best known for 2016's Jackie, which attempted to untangle another complicated woman in conflict with the ownership of her image and identity. Spencer is Lorrain's latest is prime Oscar-bait as Kristen Stewart (Happiest Season) slips into playing the people's princess during a fictionalized Christmas retreat with the royal family. If you're familiar with Jackie, and it's a great movie that I would recommend, then Spencer feels very similar in subject and approach. I had to go back to my review of Jackie and I was stunned at how applicable several points of the review were for Spencer as well: "We're left with an immersive, impressionistic look at America's most famous first lady since it's hard to distinguish the layers of performance from the woman herself. She was used to adopting the facade of what the public expected of her, how her husband's friends looks at her with desire and dismissiveness, and the differences between her private life and her public persona. It's a fascinating glimpse into the interior space of a famous woman that so many people think they know well because of her glamour and television appearances, but do they really?" Wow is that still ever apt talking about Diana, a woman who is told to compartmentalize herself, to present one version of her to the public, the ravenous masses that all wanted a piece of her, and all have their own idealized version of her as princess, and another in private. The question arises how Diana can approach privacy inside her gilded cage. She's living a life in the public sphere as a figurehead for a country's monarchy, the mother of potential kings, and intense scrutiny both outside and within. The royals are formulated on tradition and ceremony and notably control. Things have always been this way and they'll continue to be this way because they've always been this way. Diana's life is micromanaged to an absurd degree, including which outfits she is to wear on which occasions, how much lead time is needed for family dinners, and even forcing Diana onto an archaic scale to be weighed before and after the holidays, because weight gain bespeaks a happy holiday in their opinion. Even before the royal family literally sews her bedroom curtains shut, denying Diana even a glimpse of the outside world they fear, you can relate to how much this people's princess could feel like she was locked away in a tower. The movie becomes a psychological ghost story of sorts, a woman stumbling through the rarefied halls of history and struggling to reclaim her own identity that she feels is slipping away until she cannot even recognize herself. The royals are extremely image conscious and any break from their rules is seen as a reflection of the crown and thus a repudiation of their influence. Diana is punished for having the audacity to change her dress in front of her bedroom window, never mind that the royal estate is vast. This is seen as careless attention-seeking, like Diana is courting the paparazzi to capture glimpses of her undressing. Her marriage to Charles is unhappy and coasting on ceremony and her adoration of her two children. Charles accuses her lateness as being a sign of Diana possibly having an affair. Never mind that Charles has been callously obvious about his own affair to the point that he even purchased his wife and mistress the same pearl necklace. Diana decides to wear the pearls in defiance, proving to Charles and his family that she doesn't care and will hold her head high, but at dinner, the pearls become radioactive to her and she fumbles to rip them off, like they're singing her skin. Diana's options are small here and the performative gestures of defiance remind me of those period piece romances where flitting glances and a touch of fingers constitute romantic advances. For Diana, choosing to wear a different dress is rebellion. Keeping her curtains open is rebellion. Asking that her young son not go on a family hunt and kill pheasants is rebellion. It's about recognizing the small acts and their symbolic meaning. This is also a story of a woman's declining mental and physical health. Her marriage was crumbling, she was resentful of the pressure of a family that would likely view her as an uncouth outsider undeserving of her attention and consideration. There was not a level of support for Diana, and besides her own children, her only real allies appear to be those representing the help at the massive Norfolk estate. Her best ally in the movie is Maggie (Sally Hawkins), a woman responsible for helping Diana dress herself. Maggie is her lone confidant, and when she is suddenly dismissed and replaced, Diana feels unmoored and betrayed when Charles tells her that Maggie said Diana was "cracking up." Diana is also suffering from an eating disorder and self-harming and, given the constant pressure on her to perform and all the power she has lost in her position, it makes sense that she would lash out for some semblance of control, over her body, over something tangible and her own. The biggest flight of fancy is that Diana sees none other than Anne Boleyn traipsing the halls and staring back at her in sympathy, nodding at their common ground as scapegoats for philandering husbands. While some have blanched at Stewart portraying Diana, I found the role to play to her strengths and she delivers a very good performance deserving of awards merit. Much of Diana as a character is internalized, communicated through layers of micro-emotions and gestures. She was private, guarded, and suspicious, not to mention going through tremendous mental strain, and this plays to Stewart's ability to resemble much through her subtle expressions of discomfort. Her accent is near flawless and the performance feels deeply empathetic without amounting to a bland impersonation. Stewart feels like she's barely holding it together as a woman going from one indignity to another, wanting to scream silently in every vacant room. Her speaking is very tremulous, almost as if she's unsure of whether it's safe to say every additional syllable. She's most relaxed and warm during the moments with her children, which clearly have a curative and nourishing effect on Diana. The movie is about finding the actual person beneath the headlines, and from an outsider's perspective it might be impossible. The empathetic script by Steven Knight (Eastern Promises) and the measured, evocative performance from Stewart reclaim a woman often portrayed as a saint or martyr. The technical direction in the movie is outstanding, though very reminiscent in approach to Jackie. Lorrain prefers to tether his camera to his lead character, often seeing the encroaching spaces from Diana's height and perspective, walking from room to room, and letting the studious and ornate production design provide the atmosphere of walking through, and against, thousands of years of history and tradition. The musical score by Johnny Greenwood (There Will Be Blood) is somber and eerie when it's emphasizing cellos and strings and confused me when the brassy horn section came in, making me feel uncomfortable by the discordant musical elements. Spencer is a movie where every technical element is in service of a lead performance, and not all of Lorrain's artistic choices seem to connect as smoothly. He's already given himself an immersive, impressionistic template to start with that allows for plenty of artistic room, and the movie is filled with quiet moments and metaphors that can be unpacked by some and skipped over by others. The ongoing thread of Diana wanting to return to her boarded-up childhood home is something that feels like it's meant to be much more meaningful than how it ultimately plays out. There are other symbols through, like a scarecrow or the biography of Ann Boleyn or Diana, during what I assume is a feverish dream, consuming the pearls of her necklace in bold defiance. I found Spencer to be an enjoyable though opaque character study with enough space and consideration to dig through the layers. It feels like a spiritual sister to Jackie but I was not captivated by Spencer like I was with Jackie, a movie that stayed with me for days. I can appreciate the nuance and artistry at play with Spencer but the movie can also feel at points like watching Princess Diana's sad vacation video. Nate's Grade: B

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Kristen Stewart in a clunky jacket and huge tulle skirt, seen from a long distance and outlined against a window in Spencer

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The Kristen Stewart movie Spencer is more real-life horror story than Princess Di biopic

It’s more about haunting impressions and emotions than specific history

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This 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.

The Princess Diana biopic 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.

Likewise 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. Nor does it affix her as a predictably doomed victim. Instead, Spencer takes place during a Christmas weekend in 1991, at the Queen’s Sandringham estate. Diana (Kristen Stewart) is still in a fraught marriage with Prince Charles (a cold Jack Farthing), or at least partially. 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. Spencer is an act of psychological horror, a kind of ghost story, and a survivalist picture carried by an uncannily immersive Kristen Stewart, in the best performance of her career.

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. Instead, they find subtler ways to weave her legend into a realistic narrative. Spencer opens with Diana, without a chauffeur or bodyguard, driving herself to Sandringham House. The confident royal loses her way, ultimately deciding to stop to ask for directions. In front of normal folks, she assumes a shy, somewhat vulnerable disposition. Her eyes swing skyward as her head tilts to the 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. But not in a salacious way. 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, her father, John Spencer, died three months after that Christmas, of a heart attack.) She goes to retrieve the outerwear, hoping to have it cleaned. 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.

Diana also connects with her ancestry in the film. Equerry Major Gregory (a punchable Timothy Spall), a craggy Scottish war veteran who now narcs for the Queen, pesters Diana to conform 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. And after she finds a book about Anne Boleyn on her bed, possibly placed there by Major Gregory, she dreams of the distant relative, the second wife of Henry VIII, who was beheaded after he falsely accused her of adultery. Between the coat and the spirit of Anne Boleyn, Diana is drawn toward her now-condemned childhood home.

Who can blame Diana for feeling locked-in? 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. But in the face of domineering men like Charles and Major Gregory, along with the unbending protocol of the estate and her eating disorder, she can barely protect herself. The mania she feels makes her Christmas holiday more of a fight for survival than a getaway.

Jonny Greenwood’s score opens as classically British, then morphs into an unnerving symphony. Following a similar aesthetic to 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.

Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) sits on the floor between two beds with her children William and Harry in Spencer

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. But beyond that, her performance comes down to the eyes. Stewart’s eyes swing like switchblades through the grass. And each glance claims another victim, displaying either a kind of forlornness or a shyness, depending on the situation. 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.

The film has two climaxes, and one comes when Diana finally makes it back to her childhood home. She’s frantic and hallucinating, and Mathon’s camera closes even more perilously into her. This is where Jackie editor Sebastián Sepúlveda shines, providing a vivid and haunting montage of her life leading up to the moment. The other climax flips the tenor of the film from grim to celebratory. 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. But it works, because the director knows the audience has an inherent desire for Diana to have a happy ending.

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. But it is the inventive, iconoclastic film Diana deserves.

Spencer will arrive in American theaters on Nov. 5, 2021.

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Diana Spencer, struggling with mental-health problems during her Christmas holidays with the Royal Family at their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, decides to end her decade-long marr... Read all Diana Spencer, struggling with mental-health problems during her Christmas holidays with the Royal Family at their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, decides to end her decade-long marriage to Prince Charles. Diana Spencer, struggling with mental-health problems during her Christmas holidays with the Royal Family at their Sandringham estate in Norfolk, England, decides to end her decade-long marriage to Prince Charles.

Pablo Larraín
Steven Knight
Kristen Stewart
Timothy Spall
Sally Hawkins
1K User reviews
313 Critic reviews
76 Metascore
47 wins & 134 nominations total

Major Alistar Gregory

Prince Philip

Princess Anne
Queen Mother

Anne Boleyn

Footman Paul

Angela (Dresser)

Maria (Older Maid)

Pamela (Maid)

Michael (Charles' Valet)
Barbara (Nanny)
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Trivia Princess Diana's former bodyguard Ken Wharfe on Stewart's performance: "Out of all the people who have played Diana over the past 10 years, she's the closest to her. She managed to perfect her mannerisms."
Goofs The licence plate of Diana's car changes from a G plate to a J plate in the first five minutes of the film. Is seen again towards the end and changes from J when it is first seen again and then it changes back to G again.

Diana : Will they kill me, do you think?

Crazy credits A Fable From A True Tragedy
Connections Edited into Amanda the Jedi Show: Faster than your First Time Reviews 2 - Best and Worst of TIFF 2021 (2021)
Soundtracks All I need is a Miracle Written by Christopher Neil and Mike Rutherford Performed by Mike + The Mechanics Published by Hit & Run Music (Publishing) Ltd. and Concord Music Publishing LLC Courtesy of Michael Rutherford Limited Under License to BMG Rights Management Ltd.

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Kristen stewart in princess diana biopic ‘spencer’: film review | venice 2021.

Director Pablo Larraín, who upended the conventions of the genre with ‘Jackie,’ examines another iconic woman in crisis, this time as the last illusions of her fairy-tale marriage crumble.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in 'Spencer'

Any film in which a woman who left an indelible mark on the popular culture of the late 20th century finds comfort in the ghost of Anne Boleyn is unlikely to be your grandparents’ Princess Diana biopic. Pablo Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight ’s audaciously original Spencer reins in its tight focus to a three-day Christmas weekend at Queen Elizabeth II’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk in the early ‘90s, when the sham of Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles had become unendurable. Billed as “a fable from a true tragedy,” this is a speculative study of a woman in extremis, played by an incandescent Kristen Stewart .

Chilean director Larraín’s transfixing 2016 English-language debut, Jackie , trained its emotionally penetrating lens on Jacqueline Kennedy reeling in the shell-shocked wake of her husband’s assassination. While it has a similar raw intimacy, his new film, by contrast, examines another woman in the public eye as she faces the inevitability of an escalating crisis, anticipating the harsh glare of a spotlight that has already scorched her on multiple occasions.

Full credits

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition) 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, Laura Benson, Wendy Patterson, Emma Darwall-Smith Distributor: Neon/Topic Studios Production companies: Komplizen Film, Fabula, Shoebox Films, in association with FilmNation Entertainment Director: Pablo Larraín Screenwriter: Steven Knight Producers: Juan de Dios Larraín , Jonas Dornbach, Paul Webster, Janine Jackowski, Maren Ade, Pablo Larraín Executive producers: Steven Knight, Tom Quinn, Jeff Deutchman, Christina Zisa, Maria Zuckerman, Ryan Heller, Michael Bloom, Ben Von Dobeneck, Sarah Nagel, Isabell Wiegand Director of photography: Claire Mathon Production designer: Guy Hendrix Dyas Costume designer: Jacqueline Durran Editor: Sebastián Sepúlveda Music: Jonny Greenwood Casting: Amy Hubbard

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‘Spencer’ Film Review: Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana Makes for a Brilliant and Silly Drama

Chilean director Pablo Larrain’s film has the potential to become a gothic, almost camp classic

Kristen Stewart in Spencer Princess Diana

This review of “Spencer” was first published on Sept. 3 after the film’s premiere at the Venice Film Festival.

Self-billed as “a fable from a true tragedy,” Pablo Larrain’s “Spencer,” which had its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival on Friday, homes in on the unraveling of Diana, Princess of Wales, over three bitter days around Christmas in the Queen’s country house at Sandringham in Norfolk. Hinging (or unhinging) on a major performance from Kristen Stewart, the movie itself unfurls in a torrent of ideas and madness, some of it brilliant, some of it quite silly.

Chilean director Larrain came to international prominence with excellent films commenting on the effect of the disturbing and violent politics of the Pinochet regime in his country — and just as he skewered the myth of Kennedy’s Camelot in his 2016 Venice film “Jackie,” with Natalie Portman, he doesn’t spare the British establishment here. He depicts the royal court as a place of ruthless treachery dressed up in eccentricity and tradition, with Diana as the latest in a long line of victims that runs all the way back to Anne Boleyn.

How true any of it is will concern as many people as it delights, particularly in the U.K. But Larrain, working from Steven Knight’s script, is clearly going for something more classical here than can be found in an episode of the giant Netflix series “The Crown.” “Spencer” creates an intense, giddy spectacle with Shakespearean or indeed Racinian ambitions.

It begins on Christmas Eve in the early 1990s, as Sandringham prepares for the arrival of the royal party. A prominent notice in the kitchen warns workers they should “Keep the Noise to a Minimum: They Can Hear You,” and the notion of the walls having ears and eyes is a constant, perhaps over-stressed, theme of the film.

princess diana Naomi Watts, Emma Corrin, Kristen Stewart (

Diana herself is driving up in a racing green Porsche and gets lost, stopping to ask directions in a local greasy-spoon cafe (fish and chips cost £2.70) where the diners and staff soon fall silent and agape at their illustrious visitor.

It is of course an early metaphor for Diana’s more existential sense of loss as she heads to the palace accompanied by a dissonant trumpet score, composer Jonny Greenwood twisting the traditional sounds of heraldry into something creepy and unsettling. Larrain’s overhead shot of Diana’s approach turns Sandringham into a haunted house, or the Overlook Hotel from “The Shining,” rather than a royal residence. With its all-seeing walls and freezing rooms, it’s a place that will send the Princess into a frenzy with its rules and customs and silences.

Diana is stalked by visions of Anne Boleyn (from whom the Spencer family are distantly descended) and she’s compelled to read a tome about Henry VIII’s beheaded wife when she finds it placed in her rooms. These apparitions are startling yet also faintly ridiculous, although in her fragile performance, Stewart always sells them to the audience.

While there are some notable supporting roles for Timothy Spall, Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins, it’s Stewart’s film. She gets the doe-eyed, pitying tilt of the head and the little posh girl voice down pretty well, but this is no impression — it’s more an interpretation of a classic role, bringing layers of real human complexity to a figure who, for all the mythology that surrounds her, still looms large in the British and global conscience.

This Diana isn’t the likable People’s Princess or Queen of Hearts whom the public adored. We get none of that. Instead, she’s prickly, self-absorbed and self-pitying, spoiled and brattish; but while the cold seeps into every room, we do warm to her obvious affection for her children and their love for her.

Larrain does open up his shots for some of the dinner scenes and the below-stairs bustle, but he prefers to return to claustrophobic close-ups, like mini-plays within the main drama. There’s a tender, candlelit scene with Diana and her boys (Jack Nielen as William, Freddie Spry as a cute, confused Harry) pretending to be her soldiers; several tense exchanges with Spall’s threatening, controlling equerry; and trusting confessions with her favorite dresser, Maggie, played by Hawkins.

“This dress doesn’t fit,” she tells Maggie, who lays out a prescribed outfit (props to Jacqueline Durran’s superb costume work) for each occasion, from breakfast to church to dinner. “Have you tried it on?” asks the dresser. “No,” says the Princess. “I mean it doesn’t fit my mood.”

The dialogue is rather on-the-nose, and practically every sentence feels aware of itself as a pronouncement of era-defining depth and acuity. “Beauty is useless, beauty is clothing”; “There is no future here, only past and present’; “I watch to make sure others do not see.”

And there are some scenes that risk teetering into unintentional comedy, such as the fantasy sequence of Diana’s pearls falling into her green soup, which she will rush off and vomit into the royal downstairs loo. There’s a conversation with Spall in a huge fridge, surrounded by cakes and hams and bits of chicken; the corgis filing out of their own Rolls Royce; the family gathered round the telly to watch the Queen’s Christmas Speech; and perhaps the less said the better about a scene with Diana talking to one of the royal pheasants (“beautiful birds but not too bright”) and envying its plumage because “you can always wear the same outfit.”

There are precious few grace notes here, nothing to endear this flailing princess to us and practically no interaction with anyone else in the family, apart from a couple of withering observations from Stella Gonet’s Queen Elizabeth. There is a chilling showdown with Jack Farthing’s Prince Charles, the couple separated by the length of a snooker table, accusing each other of “being delayed by someone” in reference to their mutual infidelities. Diana, throughout, is particularly upset that he has given the same pearl necklace Christmas present to “her,” meaning of course his longtime mistress, Camilla Parker Bowles.

Far from the laughable disaster of Oliver Hirshbiegel’s 2013 “Diana” starring Naomi Watts, Larrain’s “Spencer” will cause a sensation yet has also plenty of craft to admire, in Greenwood’s swirling and tumultuous score and Claire Mathon’s textured cinematography, here framing what you could call another portrait of a lady on fire.

With its Grand Guignol and horror movie tropes, Spencer is probably more fun than a somber festival premiere can allow it to be. And despite the high seriousness (even the taboo) of it for many, it could well grow into a gothic, almost camp classic. It’s certainly a royal biopic like no other and, losing her head like Anne Boleyn before her, Kristen Stewart gives it her all.

Review: Pablo Larrain's brilliant 'Spencer' unleashes a royally wonderful Kristen Stewart

With a stellar performance from Kristen Stewart , director Pablo Larraín’s supremely brilliant “Spencer” is an enlightening glimpse into the mind of Princess Diana that doubles as an effective horror film. Rooted in a holiday setting, it also splendidly captures moments of absolute joy and exuberance even amid a sad larger narrative.

Labeled “a fable from true tragedy,” the drama (★★★★ out of four; rated R; in theaters now) is a psychological head trip and fictional imagining of Diana's (Stewart) time with the British royal family over three days around Christmas 1991, spent at the queen’s annual holiday destination, Sandringham House.

Diana has already had it with cold Prince Charles (a very punchable Jack Farthing) and a separation is around the corner, but the princess is haunted by her past and present as the toil and trouble of being part of the monarchy weighs on her heavily.

Princess Diana: Hollywood's obsession will never end, but it's getting ridiculous

As the film opens, she’s already going her own way: Diana zooms along alone in her sports car apart from the rest of the family – including sons Harry (Freddie Spry) and William (Jack Nielen) – and is late, having gotten lost and had to stop at a fish-and-chips shop for directions. Once she reaches the palatial estate, Diana is welcomed by having to get on a scale, a family tradition in which fun over the holidays is measured in extra pounds at the end – not great for those wrestling with an eating disorder like Diana.

From the command wardrobe changes to the queen (Stella Gonet) giving her stares at dinner to Charles mansplaining how there has to be two of her (“the real you and the one they take pictures of”), it all gets a little maddening for Diana. She has a staunch ally in royal dresser Maggie (a fabulous Sally Hawkins), though her helper is sent away by the powers that be, and Diana’s increasingly drawn to a neighboring farm where she spent time in her childhood, a scarecrow-dotted contrast to her current celebrity status.

“Spencer” is a sister film to Larrain’s fabulous “Jackie” (with Natalie Portman as a grieving Jackie Kennedy) in creating a surreal and fantastical environment around a real person. Diana sees visions of not only memories of herself, but also Anne Boleyn as the claustrophobia of her situation takes hold. She’s surrounded by shifting Kubrickian horrors – this Sandringham is about as creepy a joint as the Overlook in “The Shining” – and Larraín boldly shows its effects on her. One scene has her beautiful gown splayed across the floor gloriously as she rests her head on a toilet, and there are a couple outstanding moments (like an unnerving bit with a bowl of soup) involving the pearls Charles gifted her – the same he also gave rumored mistress Camilla Parker Bowles.

Oscars 2022: Kristen Stewart vaults to the front of the best-actress race as Princess Diana

In a career-best turn (and sporting a serviceable English accent), Stewart wonderfully navigates Diana’s out-of-control spiral and crafts a deeply complex character it’s impossible not to love, whether or not you’re an Anglophile obsessed with royal goings-on. There’s paranoia, terror, anger and sadness in her rousing portrayal that arrives balanced by the love, happiness and protective nature she exudes when she’s around her boys. “I want to be your mum,” Diana tells them. “That’s my job.”

Larraín puts Diana through hell, but the best thing he does in “Spencer” is lift her back up. It’s a ghost story but also an underdog’s story, a fighter’s story, a mother’s story and, thanks to an Oscar-ready Stewart at the absolute top of her game, one of the very best movies you’ll see this year.

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In “Spencer,” Kristen Stewart’s Princess Diana Is Forever Trying Out Roles

By Anthony Lane

Kristen Stewart as Diana Princess of Wales wearing a white dress and a blazer as she stands in a foggy field.

Picture the scene. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, mooching around their Montecito stronghold and desperate to get out for the evening, are picking a movie to see. “Dune”? Too long. “No Time to Die”? Too sad. Harry won’t watch “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” because it reminds him of the British press. Meghan won’t watch “The Addams Family 2,” because it reminds her of lunch at Windsor Castle. “Hey, I know!” she cries. “Let’s go and see a film about your mother .”

“Spencer” is a rum concoction, starring Kristen Stewart as the late Princess of Wales. It is written by Steven Knight, directed by Pablo Larraín, and described at the outset as “a fable from a true tragedy”—fancy talk for “We kind of made this stuff up.” The time frame is concise: Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and December 26th. (No year is specified, but I would guess 1991.) Most of the action takes place in and around Sandringham House, the royal residence in the county of Norfolk. Diana travels there alone, in a Porsche, without a security detail. She gets lost along the way and stops to ask for directions, admitting, “I’ve absolutely no idea where I am.” This is unlikely, since she should know the area well; she was born and raised on the Sandringham Estate. What Larraín wants to make thumpingly clear, though, is that Diana is now a soul adrift, wretched in her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) and all but ostracized by his relations.

Anyone who endured a film like “Diana” (2013)—a starchy royal bio-pic, with Naomi Watts—will gather, within minutes, that “Spencer” is going to be far more elastic, not to say expressionist, in regard to the rules of the genre. The people we meet here, as in a children’s game, are split into goodies and baddies. One side comprises Diana, her sons, William and Harry (very well played, with a solemn charm, by Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry), and Maggie (Sally Hawkins), her favorite dresser and confidante, who says things like “Hold on. Fight them. Be beautiful.” There is also the head chef, Darren (Sean Harris), who is sympathetic to Diana’s plight, though he is busy overseeing the foodstuffs, lobsters included, that are ferried to the house by troops. A sign on the kitchen wall, possibly borrowed from the set of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” reads “Keep noise to a minimum. They can hear you.” Yikes.

“They,” of course, refers to the opposing team, captained by the Queen (Stella Gonet) and concentrated in the frigid—and fictional—person of Major Alistair Gregory, who is played, in a lavish piece of miscasting, by Timothy Spall, one of the warmest of character actors. Gregory has been drafted in to keep everything safe and secure; instead, he merely fortifies Diana’s belief that she is being imprisoned. To deter the prying lenses of photographers, Gregory has her bedroom curtains sewn shut. She promptly cuts them open and, as an afterthought, deliberately snips her bare arm. Or maybe she imagines doing so, since the flesh is then shown to be, as yet, unhurt.

The movie teems with bad dreams of this kind. Diana’s necklace—a present from her husband—breaks, at dinner, and the pearls drop into a bowl of thick green soup. She fishes them out, swallows them, and later regurgitates them: a gloopy, gothic heightening of the bulimia from which Diana, at her unhappiest, is known to have suffered. Other fantasies are more tenuous still, notably the appearance of Anne Boleyn (Amy Manson), who pops up here and there as a cautionary kindred spirit, the implication being that to lose your mind (“I’m a magnet for madness,” Diana says) is the latter-day equivalent of losing your head, as the luckless Anne did in 1536. Her presence in “Spencer” also answers a nagging question: Why do filmmakers keep on lugging the saga of modern British royalty onto our screens? Because it is the only costume drama that happens to have lingered, unaccountably, into the here and now.

The most telling invention devised by Knight and Larraín concerns Diana’s birthplace, Park House, a short walk from where she is staying for Christmas. One night, she sneaks over to the dark, deserted building, where relics of her childhood, such as a doll’s house, are conveniently strewn. The staircase cracks underfoot, and she envisages launching herself from the top of it. But here’s the thing. In 1983, well before the events depicted, or cooked up, in “Spencer,” the Queen gave Park House to Leonard Cheshire Disability, a charity of which she is the patron—a gesture of no interest to this ungenerous film. (Leonard Cheshire, a much decorated Second World War pilot, and an observer at Nagasaki, was a saintly, efficient, and altogether remarkable man, who devoted the second half of his life to the care of others.) In 1987, Park House opened as a hotel for the disabled. It was not , therefore, available for paranoid prowling.

“Spencer” is, in many ways, baloney, abundantly spiced with slander. It is contemptuous of those whom it accuses of treating Diana with contempt. Although Maggie says to her, “Don’t see conspiracy everywhere,” the film sees nothing but. I can’t decide what made me laugh louder: the dead pheasant, stiffly positioned on the road at the entrance to Sandringham, like a prop from a Monty Python sketch, or the Prince of Wales informing his wife that “you have to be able to make your body do things you hate.” He sounds like a Pilates instructor.

And yet, strange to say, the film is hard to ignore. For all its follies, I would rather watch it again than sit through further episodes of “The Crown.” The sight of that show clawing toward the credible, without ever quite getting there, is painful to behold, whereas Larraín is somehow freed by the liberties that he takes with historical facts. Just as he drew us into the grieving consciousness of Jacqueline Kennedy, in “ Jackie ” (2016), so, now, he tunes in to Diana’s high anxiety; the camera is constantly on her, with her, and around her, as if drunk on her perception of the world.

Much is demanded, then, of Kristen Stewart, and she responds with vigor. What we get is not so much an authentic portrait (though the shy tilt of the head is uncanny) as a set of variations on the theme of Diana, ranging from the tender to the loopy, and stressing the extent to which she herself is forever trying out roles. The best scene finds her waking her sons up, for early-morning Christmas presents, and starting a game—gruffly pretending to be in the military. (“Do you want to be king, soldier?” William is asked by his brother.) Keeping Stewart company is a wonderful score by Jonny Greenwood , which mingles echoes of Purcell with noodling riffs. Unbalanced and unjust, “Spencer” is nonetheless perversely gripping. It dares to unbend, playing the angry fool amid kings-to-be, queens, princes, princesses, and all that jazz.

If you doubt that any movie could pay more exhaustive attention to its heroine than “Spencer” does, try “Hive.” Written and directed by Blerta Basholli, it’s another feature film based on a real person: in this case, a woman named Fahrije (Yllka Gashi), proud and severe, who seldom escapes our frame of vision. Like the Princess of Wales, Fahrije is the mother of two children, but she dwells at the opposite end of the economic spectrum, in a village in Kosovo, and I suspect that she would, if apprised of Diana’s unusual predicament, advise her to toughen up fast. It takes a lot to make Fahrije smile and even more to make her weep, so how come she cries when she realizes that her daughter has begun her periods? Is it because of what awaits her as a woman, in the teeth of a wolfish society?

Not until the end credits are we told what has befallen Fahrije, though vigilant viewers will have pieced the tale together. Her husband was among the local Albanian Kosovars rounded up by Serbian forces, seven years earlier, in 1999. He is still missing, presumed dead, though Fahrije doesn’t share this presumption. She is a widow-in-waiting, that most forlorn of creatures, and she is joined and sustained in her limbo by fellow-wives, who also fear the worst. Somewhere behind “Hive,” I think, you can hear the far-off cry of Euripides’ “The Trojan Women,” which recounts the agony of Hecuba, the Queen of Troy, and of others bereaved by the ruination of their home—and which, incidentally, was staged out of doors in Pristina, the Kosovan capital, in 2018.

The bitterest aspect of Basholli’s film is the attitude of the men in the village. Far from supporting the single women, they scorn them, and resent any hint of female enterprise or independence. Fahrije has plenty of both. She learns to drive, she keeps bees, and she branches out, with the aid of her friends, into producing ajvar , a paste made from roasted red peppers, to be sold in a Pristina supermarket. And what does she get for her pains? She is called a whore. A stone is thrown through the window of her car. And, in the most evocative scene, she finds her jars of ajvar smashed, and the womenfolk picking through the debris, like gleaners on a battlefield. In a movie that is redolent of violence, yet devoid of bloodshed, here is a welter of scarlet. Fahrije, of course, clears up, and carries on. ♦

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Good at shoulder-shrugging convulsions of misery … Kristen Stewart in Spencer.

Spencer review – Kristen Stewart’s Diana impersonation is enjoyably strange

Pablo Larraín’s overwrought fantasy, set during a stifling royal Christmas in 1991, offers an arthouse-bizarro version of Diana’s story

W hat would have been Princess Diana’s 60th birthday came and went this summer, marked by a solemn new statue in the Sunken Garden at Kensington Palace in London, showing her with three generically grateful children; this statue effectively superseded the one of Diana with Dodi Fayed in Harrods department store, which was taken down in 2018 . But maybe that new bronze image will itself be superseded by the arthouse-bizarro Diana promoted in Spencer, an entertaining, if overwrought, overpraised and slightly obtuse movie, an ironised fantasy opera without music. It is about Diana having a “crack-up” over one stifling Windsor Christmas at Sandringham in 1991, with which screenwriter Steven Knight appears to have transcribed a dream he once had after eating his bodyweight in brie. The director is the Chilean film-maker Pablo Larraín, and it features an intrusive score by Jonny Greenwood, deafeningly cranking up the dysfunction.

Diana is cleverly impersonated by Kristen Stewart, who is particularly good at shoulder-shrugging convulsions of misery and protest – although this big-screen awards-season performance is not as good as Emma Corrin’s relaxed and sympathetic portrayal in TV’s The Crown. However, Stewart does get the biggest laugh of the year when Diana irritably dismisses a maid to be alone: “I want to masturbate …”

As in Larraín’s 2016 film, Jackie , about Jackie Kennedy’s trauma after the JFK assassination, this features quite a bit of Diana wandering stricken through corridors, although Jackie had just been showered in her dead husband’s blood. To approximate something like that motivation, this film conspicuously exaggerates Diana’s first-world problems with black-comic stylings, fictional flourishes and some beautiful images. The nightmarish absurdity of what Diana had to endure and her consequent unhappiness create something that looks as if it has been co-directed by former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie and Dario Argento. The film maybe concedes a little drama-queen-of-hearts entitlement on Diana’s part, but of course we are supposed to be absolutely on her side, with flinch-making scenes of self-harm and bulimia.

Diana has showed up to Sandringham alone, casually driving herself in her open-topped sports car, committing an unpardonable error of taste in arriving after the Queen (Stella Gonet). She is already semi-estranged from Charles (Jack Farthing), who snaps meanly at her over one of the interminable meals, and Diana is, moreover, menaced by a fictional glowering flunkey, Major Gregory (Timothy Spall). But there are friendly faces about: her boys William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), with whom Stewart has a sweet scene, playing at soldiers on parade. The fictional cook Darren (Sean Harris) is her confidant and mate, and she has her devoted fictional dresser Maggie (Sally Hawkins).

What is most intolerable for Diana is having to wear the clothes picked out for her, and again Knight gives Stewart some great lines. Holding up a gown, she says to her sour-faced maid: “It doesn’t fit.” – “Have you tried it on?” – “With my mood.” Driven mad by depression and by the Firm’s callous indifference and emotional stagnancy, Diana roams the grounds at night, to the horror of the local police, and tries breaking in to her nearby childhood home.

But the film ultimately implies that her problems are down to the ghastly Windsors: away from them, driving around in her car with the boys, listening to Mike and the Mechanics on the tape-deck and having an unpretentious KFC, she could relax and be herself, a Spencer . But you could argue that the Spencers were terribly grand and messed-up as well. Another type of film, without all the Halloween gothic naivety, might have challenged this view; it might have dramatised her relationship with her mother, say, or with the boys’ nanny, “Tiggy” Legge-Bourke. This an enjoyably strange spectacle, perhaps best appreciated by taking it less seriously than its creators intended.

Drama films
Diana, Princess of Wales
Kristen Stewart
Queen Elizabeth II
King Charles III

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Spencer Is a Movie About Princess Diana Finding Freedom—And It Will Transform You

By Christopher Rosa

SPENCER Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana 2021. © Neon Courtesy Everett Collection

At the end of Spencer —the highly anticipated Pablo Larraín film starring Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana —Diana drives her two young sons away from Sandringham Estate to a KFC in the middle of London. Yes, a KFC.

With a bucket of chicken and large fountain drinks in hand, the three head to a bench overlooking a stunning harbor. Harry and William chow down as Diana drapes herself over a railing, scanning the water. She takes a deep breath, almost as if she's exhaling for the first time in 10 years. It's the first time viewers can breathe a sign of relief too. Because Diana did it. She's free.

In Spencer 's version of events—the film calls itself a “fable from a true tragedy”—this is the moment when Diana finally rids herself of the royal family and all its suffocating, dehumanizing constraints. It's the moment when she throws on the pair of jeans she wants instead of a meticulously scheduled wardrobe. When she eats fast food instead of gourmet cuisine. In short, it's the first time she's truly herself.

“Having spent the weekend eating the most outrageously wonderful food and huge menus—every ingredient chosen with care—happiness and freedom equals KFC,” Spence r's screenwriter Steven Knight says. “That's the meal she wants and that's, I think, emblematic of the whole thing.”

The weekend Knight's referring to is the three-day Christmas extravaganza we see Diana experience in Spencer . The entire movie takes place over this short period of time, but it covers much ground. We're witnessing a woman and mother in crisis; her marriage is falling apart, she's struggling with an eating disorder, and her mental health is deteriorating. Her salvation is her two sons, William and Harry, but an intense royal schedule keeps her away from them more than she'd like. Her life, simply put, is no longer her own.

But she's ready to reclaim it, and she does exactly that—boldly and beautifully—by Spencer 's end. “Kristen played a woman who was in trouble, like we all go through,” Larraín tells Glamour. “She played a woman who needed to make a decision that was very hard, and we can all relate to that. I think many of us have or will eventually need to make some difficult decisions in our lives.”

Indeed, there is a universality to which Spencer depicts Princess Diana, arguably the most famous woman to draw a breath. The specifics of her story are almost ancillary to the film's message. Spencer isn't interested in regurgitating the biography of Diana; rather, it presents theories and questions about how she navigated a major crossroads in her life. In that respect, it's a story everyone can find resonant.

“Diana was someone who affected millions of people, hundreds of millions of people around the world,” Larraín says. “I think we had the chance to do something that I think is quite interesting, just to inhabit her more internal perspective. I think we were able to enter her sort of imagination, her feelings, her emotions. That is our proposal: Diana was a pop icon, a fashion icon, and a mother, as well, and a very sort of normal, regular human in a very unusual context.”

Spencer particularly emphasizes that last part: Diana the human and Diana the mother. The film's most joyous moments are when she's with her boys, playing games in Sandringham Estate and staying up into the wee hours talking. The looseness and playfulness she exudes with her kids is a stark contrast to the stiff upper lip she employs in public, when photographers are snapping away. It's a heartbreaking dichotomy—and as a viewer, you'll find yourself hoping Diana unlocks a way to be her exuberant self all the time. To be a mom first and the Princess of Wales second.

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Because Diana, at the end of the day, was a mother fighting for not just her life but her children's as well. She was fighting for her family to be as normal and as healthy as possible. It's what all parents want—but Princess Diana was never seen as a parent. She was seen as Princess Diana. Spencer changes that, humanizing her legacy in a way that's both illuminating and necessary.

“The fact that her first priority is that she's a mother and her first priority is the kids should come as no surprise,” Knight says. “Because, why wouldn't they? She's a mother. She's a human being. The fact that that would ever even be questioned suggests how ‘other’ we think of [the royals and famous people]. We think how different they must be. They're not. This is human instinct. This is what human beings do.” Spencer is now in theaters.

Christopher Rosa is the entertainment editor at Glamour. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram .

By Carrie Wittmer

Kristen Stewart’s Princess Diana Wig for Spencer Cost $6,000

By Emily Tannenbaum

Spencer Review: A Haunting Portrait of Princess Diana’s Tragic Life

In Pablo Larraín’s Spencer , it seems like Princess Diana is always in motion. She’s moving briskly down stately hallways, creeping across lawns in the dark, and running across fields. The film shows a Diana who is desperately trying to escape the suffocating confines of the Royal Family, which feel tighter than usual due to being stuck in Sandringham Estate with the whole family for the Christmas holidays.

Spencer states that it is “a fable from a true tragedy” and Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight reimagine a Diana who could have been. It’s December of 1991 and relations are strained between Diana and Charles, partially due to his ongoing affair with Camila Parker-Bowles and partially due to the attention that she is paid by the paparazzi and the country as a whole.

Of course, Diana’s life has been thoroughly examined lately in The Crown and even Diana: The Musical, the stage show that can be viewed on Netflix. What sets Spencer apart is how it focuses in on a few days to give the viewers a glimpse into Diana’s harried mind as she tries to navigate royal life. The Diana that we see Kristen Stewart portray is not the meek, young, preschool teacher that Charles chose as his bride, but a woman who is on the verge of unraveling after many years in the Royal Family.

The audience first sees Diana on her way to Sandringham Estate, where the family will be spending several days to celebrate Christmas. She has made the decision to drive herself and ended up lost, clearly a metaphor for how she feels within her life as a whole. Her realization that Sandringham is close to the Spencer family home where she lived as a child will haunt her over the next few days, as she cannot escape her desire to return to the house, now in disrepair, perhaps in hope that she will find something of the peace she once knew.

Stewart gives us an excellent portrayal of Diana, who is sinking into delusions that are artfully played out onscreen. Not only does Diana suffer from bulimia, but she also forms an obsession with Anne Boleyn, another royal woman whose husband had an affair. The linking of Diana to such a tragic figure, who lost her life at the hands of the Crown, further shows how trapped and vulnerable she feels.

Stewart is herself no stranger to public scrutiny, so it’s perhaps not surprising that she can deliver such a nuanced portrait of Diana. It’s mesmerizing to watch her completely disappear into the role which never feels like an imitation of Diana, but a full-fledged character of her own. Stewart is able to tell the audience so much with just her eyes, facial expressions and tone of her voice that submerge us fully into her inner world.

Diana has a much easier time connecting with the staff than with the Royal Family, some of whom provide lifelines for her. Sally Hawkins is excellent as Maggie, Diana’s Royal Dresser, who bolsters her and coddles her when she needs it. Sean Harris portrays Darren McGrady, the Royal Head Chef, who is a similarly grounding force for Diana, carefully putting her back on track in between preparing sumptuous extravagant meals.

However, Diana butts heads with Equerry Major Alistair Gregory, played by Timothy Spall, who has been hired to oversee the holiday. He’s an enigmatic character and Spall does a great job of portraying a British stiffness while also showing his shifting views on the princess.

Diana’s greatest joy in her life are her sons, William and Harry, played by Jack Nielsen and Freddie Spry respectively. Stewart has excellent chemistry with both boys, who are adorable, and the scenes with them ground this otherwise somewhat fantastical film. However, Nielsen does a great job at showing William’s anxiety lingering underneath as he has a better understanding of the situation than his younger brother due to his age. The audience sees a different side of Diana with her sons, but we are also given a glimpse at the pressure that Diana’s issues place on William in particular.

In addition to being impeccably directed, written, and acted, the craftwork in Spencer is magnificent. Jacqueline Durran’s costumes and Guy Hendrix Dyas’s production design are gorgeous and build a gilded cage for Diana’s life perfectly. The amount of lavish food in the film also builds this world of excess. The cinematography by Claire Mathon is beautiful and the occasional use of shaky handheld camera helps put us into Diana’s crumbling mind.

But it’s Jonny Greenwood’s score that truly stands out as the most exceptional work. The combination of very stately traditional music with a jazz influence creates a cognitive dissonance like Diana’s presence within the Royal Family. The music helps us understand Diana’s emotional state throughout the film.

Spencer is a haunting portrait of a woman on the brink of collapse, who is desperate to escape the stifling pressure of the Royal Family. It’s a moving tribute to Diana herself, but also an intriguing commentary on that posh, but toxic world after Prince Harry and Meghan’s departure from Royal life. Stewart gives the performance of her career, but she’s not the only draw; Spencer is truly one of the best-made films of the entire year.

Rating: 4.5/5

‘Spencer’ review: Casting of Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana is strangely inspired

Movie review.

The sad saga of the late Diana, Princess of Wales, seems destined to be told from numerous lenses: At the moment, you can choose from a television version (“The Crown,” from Season 3 on Netflix), a Broadway musical (“Diana,” opening to, ahem, mixed reviews ), and now “Spencer,” a film directed by Pablo Larrain (who previously examined another thoroughly scrutinized woman in “ Jackie ”). Introducing itself as “a fable from a true tragedy,” “Spencer” isn’t a biopic, but instead takes place over a desperately uncomfortable three-day Christmas holiday at the Queen’s Sandringham estate, late in Diana’s ill-fated marriage to Prince Charles. Meals are served, gowns are donned, traditions are followed and a young woman slowly fades away.

What’s most interesting about this impeccably elegant film is not its story — surely even those deeply interested in Diana’s life have pondered every possible angle by now — but its central performance. Kristen Stewart is far from an obvious match for Diana, being an American who is neither tall nor blue-eyed, but her casting turns out to be strangely inspired. Stewart — and it shouldn’t be necessary to say at this point that she’s a far better and more nuanced actor than the “Twilight” movies ever hinted at — is uncannily good at conveying nervous, clenched anxiety. Here she creates a woman who’s practically a shadow of herself. This Diana, a pale wraith who clutches at her children like she needs them to keep her tethered, is a bird in a luxurious trap; we see the eating disorders, the mental illness, the misery. In one scene, guards find her wandering the grounds at night. “Just say you saw a ghost,” she tells them; it’s barely a lie.

Stewart lets us see how a pearl necklace (a gift from Charles, who gave the same thing to his mistress) feels like a weight around Diana’s neck; how she seems to be slowly sealed off from the world, step by step; how a chilly castle can’t be made warm with extra blankets. You watch wishing this story, in the real world, could have had a different ending; and marveling at how Stewart finds new, close-to-the-bone layers in a character we thought we already knew.

With Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris, Sally Hawkins. Directed by Pablo Larrain, from a screenplay by Steven Wright. 116 minutes. Rated R for some language. Opens Nov. 5 at multiple theaters.

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‘Spencer’ Review: Kristen Stewart Slips Into Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s Unnerving Portrait of an Icon

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Editor’s note: This review was originally published at the 2021 Venice Film Festival. Neon and Topic releases the film in theaters on Friday, November 5.

Shortly before the People’s Princess drives solo into this latest telling of her tale behind the wheel of a top-down convertible, an opening epitaph promises us, “A fable based on a true tragedy.” But then, given the tight narrative focus of Pablo Larraín ’s “ Spencer ,” which takes place in 1991 over the course of three excruciating yuletide days at the royal estate of Sandringham, one might ask: To what tragedy does that opening inscription refer?

Is the onetime Diana Spencer a tragic figure because of her life — her unhappy marriage, her impossible expectations, her– listen, there are two seasons of “The Crown” about this, you already know the story — or because of her death, which arrived five and half years outside the scope of the film? This film would say both.

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With “Spencer,” director Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight have devised an often-unnerving portrait of a pop icon that works from the (almost certainly correct) assumption that in the hearts and minds of today’s public, those two facets of Diana’s story are inextricably linked. Without delving into the specifics of what happened one terrible night in Paris, Diana’s sad fate hangs over the film like a shroud, informing everything that follows.

Doing away with any pretense of docu-realism, “Spencer” is neither a film about specifics nor any of conventional biopic; it is instead a sort of haunted house chamber piece that doesn’t try to locate the real woman behind the legend — as the title might suggest — as it does to reimagine her within a wholly different pop lexicon. If Larraín dipped his toe in gothic waters with “Jackie,” and its many scenes where Natalie Portman drifted through an empty White House like a ghost haunting her previous life, here he jumps all the way in, staging “Spencer” as a psychodrama swimming the same tides as “Repulsion,” “Rosemary’s Baby,” or “Black Swan.”

Often reacting wordlessly against an oppressive Jonny Greenwood score of dissonant strings and wailing horns, Kristen Stewart meets her character halfway, adopting Diana’s posh inflection while playing her with the same waifish and haunted affect the actress put to such good use in her work with Olivier Assayas. So brash in its affectations as to occasionally cross the line into pure camp, the film finds little use for subtlety and no secret of its intent. When a patrolman catches Diana walking the grounds late one fog-filled night, the princess begs the guard not to report it. “Say you saw a ghost,” she offers instead.

More narratively threadbare than “Jackie” if not quite as formally rebellious as “Ema,” this latest in Larraín’s eclectic filmography stakes out an interesting middle ground between those previous two. For nearly all of its running time, “Spencer” charges forward as a series of set pieces tracking the acute psychological damage being in this gilded prison does to the young woman. The damage manifests in countless ways, from bouts of bulimia and self-harm, hallucinations of another doomed royal, Anne Boleyn, to a standout (and entirely dialogue-free) dinner scene where a string ensemble appears out of the blue, playing against Greenwood’s jolting score.

Tracking Diana over the course of three days, from her arrival at the sprawling estate on Christmas Eve to her decision to leave (both the estate and family) two days later, the script pointedly avoids any shouting matches or scenes of domestic drama. Charles (Jack Farthing) gets his first line of dialogue at right around the one-hour mark, turning up next to Diana as a particularly uninteresting tablemate at an entirely leaden formal banquet. That first line? A contemptuous barb — delivered with aristocratic dispassion, naturally — about her eating disorder.

And if all the familiar royals show up here and there, few get any more screentime than shots of the lavishly prepared feasts, while none are given even a fraction of the dialogue offered to the house staff, here represented by the sterling trio of Sean Harris, Timothy Spall, and Sally Hawkins, proving once and again the limitless durability of the English character actor. The three weave their way through the manor’s halls, helping to ground Diana (and “Spencer”) in the lulls between set-piece freak-outs.

Only for all their onscreen talent, the trio also reflects some of the real limitations in Larraín and Knight’s chosen approach. In this hermetically sealed, closed circuit of manor, everything — every action and conversation and line of dialogue — reflects everything else. Which is to say that when the house’s kind-hearted head chef (Harris, playing against reedy type with real warmth) tells Diana about the pheasants the groundskeepers breed for hunting, or when the coldly impassive butler (Spall, whose slimmed down figure, sunken jowls and cold mien gave him the air of the most British man to ever work at the Overlook Hotel) talks about his military sacrifice for the Crown, the subtext — if you could even call it subtext — never changes.

Nor, for that matter, does Diana. Maybe because the timing is still too soon, perhaps the real figure is still too defined, but whatever the case, Knight and Larraín don’t allow themselves the same freedom with Diana the character — with her background and motivations and reactions within the moment — as they do with the film’s form. Stewart does terrific work as this royal-turned-scream-queen, but one does get the sense that she could be even better were “Spencer” to allow the character to go as wild as everything else does around her.

For all its impressive formal swings, the film’s aura of repetitive, notes-on-a-theme fatalism can wear thin over time, which is very much the point. In that respect, Larraín shows his cards in a late, beautifully acted scene between Stewart and Hawkins that offers, with its change of scenery, a change of pace, a blast of light and human warmth. And as “Spencer” lingers within that sunnier tempo throughout its closing moments, it ironically reveals the figure’s third great tragedy: That there was another kind of world open to Diana, another sort of life possible for her all along.

“ Spencer” premiered at the 2021 Venice Film Festival.

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Review: ‘Spencer’ offers a tense, unnerving portrait of Princess Diana

Kristen stewart stars in this unconventional biopic, portraying royal life as a toxic prison..

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw

Internet Culture

Posted on Nov 5, 2021 Updated on Nov 5, 2021, 11:29 am CDT

Pablo Larraín’s Spencer is closer to psychological horror than a traditional biopic. Set at Christmas in the early 1990s, we see Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) join the British royal family at their chilly Sandringham Estate, where she’s surveilled at every turn by disapproving servants. Her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) is a disaster, and every moment of the holiday is rigidly scheduled with events she’d prefer to avoid. The only thing Diana can control is her diet, with Larraín placing her bulimia at the center of the story.

This is an unofficial sister movie to Larraín’s brilliantly tense Jackie Kennedy drama Jackie , which starred Natalie Portman in a thematically similar role: A glamorous and high-strung celebrity wife, privately breaking down while spectators dog her every move. Like Jackie, Spencer is full of claustrophobic handheld camera shots chasing its protagonist down palatial hallways. And like Jackie , it’s dominated by unsettling music—in this case written by the brilliant Jonny Greenwood ( Phantom Thread ). Greenwood’s score ratchets up the tension with jazzy, off-tempo percussion and repetitive orchestral riffs, surrounding Diana as she repeatedly tries and fails to escape the restrictions of palace life.

Kristen Stewart is an unabashedly weird casting choice for Diana; an edgy American star playing an icon of sentimental British nostalgia. She also arrives in the midst of a renewed interest in Diana as a public figure, thanks to The Crown (a more straightforward style of biopic), the much-derided Diana: The Musical , and the recent buzz of attention around Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s separation from the royal family.

Among a supporting cast of restrained, naturalistic performances, Stewart is histrionic to the point of being camp, overflowing with tics and melodramatic dialogue. (In the hands of another director, you can easily imagine Steven Knight’s screenplay becoming a total fiasco.) Her acting choices feel like a parody of cornier biopics, where A-listers jockey for awards attention by copying the mannerisms of public figures.

The real Diana is instantly recognizable, but we’re more used to seeing her in photos than in motion. Stewart’s performance animates and exaggerates the body language we recognize from the most iconic Diana imagery: The doe-eyed glance, the shyly tilted head, the nervous smiles. But Stewart’s twitchy over-the-topness feels somehow appropriate. Surrounded by nosy servants and judgemental in-laws, she doesn’t even attempt to hide her emotional distress. The more she acts out, the more people try to ignore and suppress her problems, reflecting the binge-and-purge cycle of her bulimia. Even when she speaks openly about her husband’s infidelity, she’s met by a brick wall of British repression.

Pablo Larraín, a Chilean filmmaker, offers us a rare chance to view these characters in an un-reverential manner. The royal family are played by lesser-known character actors, and the camera refuses to linger on their faces. Only Charles has a significant role, and aside from Queen Elizabeth, the other senior royals aren’t even introduced. More time is spent with the servants, with Timothy Spall as a detestable equerry (think of him as a kind of military butler), organizing the Christmas schedule with military precision. He’s the royal family’s enforcer, introduced in a queasy scene where he makes Diana weigh herself upon arrival at Sandringham. It’s a century-old tradition introduced by Queen Victoria’s husband Albert, encouraging the guests to gain three pounds over Christmas. “Just a bit of fun,” Diana echoes bitterly.

This is a needlessly cruel welcome for Diana, who responds by throwing up in the bathroom. Her bulimia is an open secret in the household, but most of them (including Charles) see it as a silly inconvenience to be discouraged or ignored. Her only allies are her young sons (played wonderfully by Jack Nielsen and Freddie Spry, starring in some of the film’s funniest moments), and two of the servants: Maggie the royal dresser (Sally Hawkins) and Darren the head chef (Sean Harris), who fruitlessly try to help her conform to expectations.

Spencer encourages us to understand Diana’s eating disorder on an instinctive level. Yes, she faces public pressure to be thin and beautiful. But there are more complex issues at play. Her visit to Sandringham is an extended exercise in force-feeding, with palace staff shuttling her to and from an endless series of formal meals. She’s trapped, attempting to shrink herself into smaller and smaller spaces. Whenever she tries to go outside, she’s herded back indoors. Even her clothes are tightly controlled, arriving with tags labeling which outfit must be worn to each event. Legendary costume designer Jacqueline Durran ( Pride & Prejudice ; Little Women ) delivers a series of distinctive early-’90s outfits that remind us of Diana’s role as a fashion icon—while also suggesting that her appearance wasn’t exactly a matter of self-expression.

Spencer arrives at an opportune moment, echoing public conversations about the treatment of young female celebrities like Britney Spears. Instead of giving us a schmaltzy portrait of “the people’s princess,” Larraín focuses on the way Diana was victimized by the royal family, offering a fictionalized but sympathetic look at her flaws. I didn’t find it quite as gripping as Jackie , but it’s a refreshing and valuable movie nonetheless, featuring a fascinatingly bold performance from Kristen Stewart.

Gavia Baker-Whitelaw is a staff writer at the Daily Dot, covering geek culture and fandom. Specializing in sci-fi movies and superheroes, she also appears as a film and TV critic on BBC radio. Elsewhere, she co-hosts the pop culture podcast Overinvested. Follow her on Twitter: @Hello_Tailor

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First Spencer reactions hail Kristen Stewart as Oscar frontrunner in a 'f--- you to the royal family'

Stewart's turn as Princess Diana earns rave reviews out of Venice for Pablo Larraín's imaginative pseudo-biopic.

Kristen Stewart is making a royal entrance into awards season .

The actress' heavily hyped turn as Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín 's Spencer debuted for critics Friday at the 2021 Venice Film Festival, and early reactions indicate the 31-year-old could be well on her way to her first Oscar nomination in a film that's sure to stimulate praise and controversy for its imaginative take on the late icon's life.

"Kristen Stewart [is] at the best she has ever been. An extraordinary f--- you to the royal family," tweeted First Showing's Alex Billington, who also called the actress a "100 percent lock" for an Oscar nod. "A ravishing, exhilarating story about a woman who can't breathe, realizing she needs to break free from the royal shackles. Larraín's best since No ."

The Daily Beast 's Marlow Stern echoes the sentiment, calling Stewart "the Best Actress frontrunner" in a film that plays as "a showcase for [her] talents." He continues: "She nails Diana's breathy voice and affect; her slouched posture; and her inner anguish. There is a musicality to her performance."

Writing for The New York Times, Kyle Buchanan cites Stewart as a "grounding presence" for the film's borderline camp interpretation of Diana's life. "The more the movie goes on, the more her casting even seems like a meta stroke of genius: Stewart is one of the few people on the planet who has known paparazzi scrutiny that is even somewhat comparable to the fusillade of flashbulbs that hounded Diana until her death. If Diana doesn't always want to come out of her room, you can imagine that Stewart has felt those feelings, too: Whether she plays the game or not, there's no real way to win," he said.

Spencer — which also screens at the awards-positioning Telluride Film Festival this weekend — follows Stewart as the ill-fated, real-life icon as she comes to terms with the dissolution of her marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) over a holiday stay at the queen's Sandringham Estate. Though the family engages in typical Christmas celebrations, Diana works through the inner turmoil of her personal life in an "imagining of what might have happened during those few fateful days," according to the film's official synopsis.

The project marks what many pundits have speculated could finally be Stewart's ticket to an Oscar nomination, as she's spent the last few years shifting from commercial blockbusters like Twilight to more prestige dramas such as Clouds of Sils Maria and Personal Shopper .

See what journalists are saying about Stewart's turn as Princess Diana in the first Spencer reactions out of the Venice International Film Festival below. The film is set for release via Neon on Nov. 5.

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Spencer Is a Devastating Portrait of a Princess Too Sane to Play the Royals’ Game

This review originally ran during the Toronto International Film Festival in September. We are republishing it on the occasion of the film’s theatrical release.

Diana is always running late in Spencer . In the opening scenes of Pablo Larraín’s new movie, the Princess of Wales — played with remarkable translucence by Kristen Stewart — has gotten lost after deciding to make her own way to Sandringham, to the manor where the royal family gathers for their Christmas celebration. It’s a place she knows well, having been born in nearby Park House. But as a fretful adult in the world’s most scrutinized failing marriage, she finds herself unable to recognize the area in which she was once a carefree child. As everyone else, including her husband, Charles (Jack Farthing), and their children, William (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), arrives with the standard driver and security entourage, Diana wanders alone into a café, a hush falling as she asks the woman behind the counter, “Where am I?” It’s hard to miss, as metaphors go, though there’s more to Diana’s tardiness than a loss of a sense of self. In repeatedly arriving after the queen (Stella Gonet) to meals, to photos, and to the holidays themselves, Diana is disrupting the order of things. She’s exposing the arbitrary nature of the regimented ceremonies and traditions the family depends on to set itself apart from the rest of the world.

Spencer , a portrait of a tragic modern aristocrat dealing with the weight of public regard, is an obvious bookend to Larraín’s 2016 Jackie , in which Natalie Portman played, with brittle self-awareness, a just-widowed Jacqueline Kennedy in the same situation. But Jackie was a movie about the creation of American royalty, about how its protagonist carved her late husband’s presidency into national mythology through force of will and the power of image, enshrining him as a representative of a lost idyll rather than an all-too-human man. Spencer , which was written by Steven Knight, does the reverse, mining the implicit ridiculousness of the pretense that this group of fallible human beings somehow represents a country’s soul. Diana, humiliated by Charles’s relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles and staggering from the ongoing media blitz, is treated as unreasonable, unruly, and on the verge of a breakdown, though it’s always clear her problem is that she’s too sane to play the game. “You have to be able to make your body do things you hate, for the good of the country,” Charles patiently explains to her in the one scene in which they’re alone together, as though this were only reasonable.

Diana can’t make her body do things she hates. She’s at war with her body throughout Spencer — to the point where the character, always jostling against the restrictions placed on her behavior, also literally jostles against the hallway walls like Isabelle Adjani in Possession with the intensity turned down. So many of the rituals she’s expected to comply with involve turning over control of her body, from the approved array of outfits that have been scheduled for her to the “all in good fun” weigh-in everyone must comply with to prove they’ve properly indulged over the holidays by gaining three pounds — a tradition dating back to 1847, and utter hell for someone whose eating is disordered. Diana’s bulimia becomes another way in which she fails to behave properly, every formal and informal meal an obstacle course to be navigated, with repeated scenes of the head chef, Darren (Sean Harris), barking out the ridiculously involved menus to his kitchen staff. In one of the most memorable scenes in the movie, she imagines ripping the necklace she’s been gifted off her neck and swallowing the scattered pearls along with her soup. She darts away to vomit but soon there’s someone knocking at the door, always knocking at the door, not out of concern but to say that everyone’s waiting on her.

Spencer is as precise and intricate as a luxury timepiece, each piece fitting together perfectly, no matter how small. Sally Hawkins only has a few scenes as Maggie, Diana’s trusted dresser and confidant, but exudes such warmth and good humor that we miss her as much as Diana does when she goes away. As Alistar Gregory, a former major and clear company man tasked with keeping the press away, Timothy Spall is all pursed-mouth menace. But the film is Stewart’s to carry, and she does it by going less minimalist than is her habit and by allowing an awareness of the absurdity of Diana’s situation to seep in, even as she plays the woman’s suffering entirely straight. Diana’s is such a singular dilemma, that of the tormented woman trapped in line to be queen in the 1990s , that the only person able to relate within the movie itself is Anne Boleyn, who, played by Amy Manson, shows up in visions to offer her sympathy and warnings. In some ways, the alienating plushness of her troubles is the biggest hardship of them all for Diana. She can’t help treating the staffers surrounding her as colleagues instead of people who are paid to inform on her, no matter how fond they might be, and Stewart plays the moments in which Diana blurts out her feelings as akin to the way the character runs to the bathroom after meals.

And they are fond, despite their reservations and divided loyalties. It’s impossible not to like the movie’s version of Diana, who’s simply incapable of stiff-upper-lipping her way through her own misery, too guileless about sharing her emotions and about assuming everyone around her is being just as straightforward. Stewart might not look much like the actual woman, but she’s capable of recreating a sense of her sunshine-bright charisma, the way she felt a little too much like a star for a royal set accustomed to always being gazed at while never so gauche as to do anything to merit it. Diana, with her glamorous gowns and her taste for fast food, may be forever too much and not enough, but Spencer is just right.

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Princess Diana's Wedding Dress Designer Elizabeth Emanuel to Design Modern Interpretation of Iconic Gown (Exclusive)

Elizabeth Emanuel tells PEOPLE her project big project is the "sequel" Princess Diana's bridal style

Princess Diana 's wedding dress designer is going to "climb back into the time machine" and make a modern version of the iconic bridal gown the late Princess of Wales wore to marry the future King Charles in 1981.

"I’m going to try and capture the spirit of the original — but through my eyes now," Elizabeth Emanuel tells PEOPLE exclusively in this week’s issue. "I want to preserve all the sparkles and pearls but with a completely different vision."

The designer adds of the "sequel" to the original gown, "It's a really exciting thing because I often get asked, 'Would you do the same dress again?' Well, I wouldn't change a thing on the dress in 1981, but if I was looking at it through my eyes now, there's so many possibilities."

Elizabeth and her former husband David famously made the ivory wedding dress that Lady Diana Spencer wore for her royal wedding at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on July 29, 1981, which instantly defined a decade of style. All eyes were on the royal bride, whose gown featured a ruffled collar, puffed sleeves, a voluminous skirt and a show-stopping 25-foot train.

Ted Blackbrow/Daily Mail/Shutterstock

Unbeknownst to the 20-year-old bride and the millions watching on television, the Emanuels crafted a second dress as a precautionary measure.

"I was a bit neurotic, and I thought, 'What happens if somebody breaks in and steals the dress or something spills or there’s a fire or it gets stolen?' " Elizabeth says. "So I thought, 'I’m gonna make a backup dress.' "

Inspired by a pink gown that she and David made for Diana to wear at a private ball a few days before her royal wedding , Elizabeth got to work. The extra dress differed from Diana’s iconic bridal gown , notably lacking a long train. The silk was white, "not the deep ivory that the royal wedding dress was made of" and while the actual wedding dress had puffed sleeves, Elizabeth says the backup had "slim ones, more fitted to her arms" with frilly cuffs.

Lauren Fleishman; Hair & Makeup: Graziella Cawthorne Vella

As for the fabric, Elizabeth hand-embroidered the intricate designs on the dress Diana wore, while the material for the backup was used ready-made.

The spare dress was never finished, and the designer isn’t sure what became of it. Today, the 70-year-old London-based creative has reproduced it for a special reason: to exhibit at the virtual Princess Diana Museum .

"We never got to see that dress on Diana and thought it would be lovely to envision it," says Renae Plant, the museum’s director and curator. "You cannot put a price tag on history," she adds of the acquisition for an undisclosed sum.

Tim Graham/Getty Images

As nerves mounted in the run-up to her wedding day, Diana found the design studio to be an "oasis of peace," Elizabeth says.

"She would go upstairs and chat with all the seamstresses. She loved browsing through the rails because this was a new world for her," the designer says.

Can't get enough of PEOPLE's Royals coverage? Sign up for our free Royals newsletter to get the latest updates on Kate Middleton, Meghan Markle and more!

Terry Fincher/Princess Diana Archive/Getty

Princess Diana's relationship with Elizabeth and David began shortly after they provided a blouse for a photo shoot marking the royal's engagement to Prince Charles in February 1981. A month later, Diana was a vision in a black strapless gown created by the couple, prompting her to set the husband and wife design team on the path to stardom.

"She said, ‘Would you do me the honor of making my wedding dress?’ " recalls Elizabeth, who was in a fitting with another bride when Diana rang. "It was hard to control myself."

To revisit this article, visit My Profile, then View saved stories .

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Charles Spencer Shares a Photo of Princess Diana in Her Primary School Uniform

By Erin Vanderhoof

Image may contain Diana Princess of Wales Face Head Person Photography Portrait Baby Play Area and Outdoors

Princess Diana’s younger brother, Charles Spencer, recently published a memoir called A Very Private School , where he discusses abuse and neglect at British boarding schools, including his own experiences . In the run-up to the publication, he has been sharing happier memories from his childhood to his social media accounts, including a rarely seen photograph from approximately 1967, which shows Diana and Spencer posing on a swing set along with their mother, Frances Shand Kydd. On Wednesday, he shared another rare photograph showing Diana and Charles in crimson uniforms on their way to elementary school.

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In the photo caption, Spencer explained he and Diana attended school together in Norfolk before he attended Maidwell Hall, the boarding school he writes about in his memoir. “My first day of school, in September 1968: my father took this photograph of me and my sister, Diana, just before he drove us to Silfield, a really lovely primary school in King’s Lynn, Norfolk,” he said. “The headmistress was Miss Jean Lowe, a warm and thoughtful lady who loved her boys and girls. I was there till 1972, when I headed off to the place I call—in my memoir—A Very Private School.”

In February 2024, Spencer said that he found his original crimson uniform jacket in the attic at Althorp House , the family estate where he currently lives with his wife, Karen Spencer. In the 2000s, an exhibition about Diana’s life included a few artifacts from her time at Silfield School, including her uniform jacket. According to The Daily Telegraph, it also included a report card showing that the future princess was deemed “good” at religious knowledge and geography, “fairly good” at history, and “very good” at writing though she “must be more careful where she puts capital letters.”

In a recent interview with People , Spencer said that he believed that Diana was unaware of the abuse he details in his memoir and likely did not experience something similar when she went to boarding school. “I don’t remember us ever really discussing what we were going through. She went to a very gentle place, I believe," he said. “We would reconnect for the school holidays, and I don’t remember ever talking about it with her.”

Erin Vanderhoof

Staff writer, royal watch.

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Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana, Freddie Spry as Prince Harry and Jack Nielen as Prince William in "Spencer." Photo: Neon. Princess Diana gained the affection of the world for her sincere involvement with the human race. But "Spencer," the new biopic about the Princess of Wales, reduces her to an eating disorder and a series of twitches, presenting her as a self-preoccupied, self ...
Princess Diana's Wedding Dress Designer Elizabeth Emanuel to Design
Published on April 3, 2024 02:00PM EDT. Princess Diana 's wedding dress designer is going to "climb back into the time machine" and make a modern version of the iconic bridal gown the late ...
Film Review: Spencer
Jul 19, 2023 - Kristen Stewart - in a wrenching, career-best performance - disappears into the role of Diana, Princess of Wales in Pablo Larraín's Spencer, a haunting gauntlet of psychological horror in the guise of a biopic. Forgoing historical specificity in favor of evocation and the hazy purgatory between dream and nightmare,….
Charles Spencer Shares a Photo of Princess Diana in Her Primary School
Princess Diana's younger brother, Charles Spencer, recently published a memoir called A Very Private School, where he discusses abuse and neglect at British boarding schools, including his own ...

‘Spencer’ Review: Kristen Stewart Transforms in Pablo Larraín’s Masterly Princess Diana Movie

Owen Gleiberman

Reviewed at Venice Film Festival (In Competition), Sept. 3, 2021. MPAA Rating: Not rated. Running time: 111 MIN.

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The Kristen Stewart movie Spencer is more real-life horror story than Princess Di biopic

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