Spencer (Web Exclusive)
Reviewed by Megan Feeney

Produced by Maren Ade, Jonas Dornbach, Janine Jackowski, Juan Dios Larraín, Pablo Larraín, and Paul Webster; directed by Pablo Larraín; written by Steven Knight; cinematography by Claire Mathon; edited by Sebastián Sepúlveda; production design by Guy Hendrix Dyas; costume design by Jacqueline Durran; music by Jonny Greenwood; starring Kristen Stewart, Timothy Spall, Jack Nielen, Freddie Spry, Jack Farthing, Sean Harris and Sally Hawkins. Color, English, 117 min. A Neon release.

“Will they kill me, do you think?” Princess Diana (Kristen Stewart) asks the palace chef (Sean Harris) in the opening sequence of Pablo Larraín’s psychological thriller Spencer. Having ditched her security detail and driven herself, Diana has gotten lost on her way to Sandringham Estate for the Royals’ Christmas celebration of 1991, arriving late, after the Queen, which is a terrible breach of binding tradition. This question—“Will they kill me?”—is one of two that haunt Spencer, within the film and, of course, extradiegetically, given the real-life Diana’s tragically fatal car accident in 1997, precipitated by paparazzi who had hounded her relentlessly since her 1981 marriage to Prince Charles. She was, as her brother seethed in his eulogy, “the most hunted person of the modern age.” Though the viewer is aware of Lady Di’s tragic fate some six years later, Larraín builds his film’s suspense around her physical and mental survival during three days in 1991, borrowing from Girl-Trapped-in-a-House horror movies: Is she “cracking up”? Will she throw herself down a staircase? Will the beastly Royals shoot her for interrupting their traditional pheasant hunt?

The second main question that haunts Spencer—“How do I look?”—is related to the first, a question Diana asks repeatedly to take measure of her audiences, so painfully aware of being watched. A royal object for public consumption, Diana is desperate to be a “real self,” a human subject with agency, associated with her eponymous preroyal maiden name. To me, these two questions within the film beg another one: given the well-established consensus view, which Larraín clearly shares, that Diana suffered under, and was ultimately martyred to, unrelenting media attention, why create a film that places her in those crosshairs again—since Larraín seems to be approaching Diana from about the same angle as Peter Morgan’s The Queen (2006) and The Crown (the Netflix series that first appeared in 2016 and reportedly remains in production). 

In a text prologue, Larraín declares Spencer “a fable based on a true tragedy,” but it might also be described as an anti-fairy tale—a feminist antidote. As the film opens, Diana is a decade into a Happily-Ever-After that is not happy at all. Ten years since the Royal-Wedding-Watched-Round-the-World, Diana has not been liberated into princess-hood, but oppressed by it. Her beauty and pure heart did not win her escape from evil family members and chilly stone towers, but imprisonment within them. And her Prince (Jack Farthing) turned out to be a faithless prick who humiliates her with his open-secret mistress Camilla Parker Bowles. (That Charles is a royal cad is also the well-established consensus view, evidence that the real-life Diana had more media savvy than the film allows).

In Spencer, oppression characterizes the very mood, which Larraín has previously described as all-important to him. First, there is the aforementioned oppression of the gaze, rendered by Larraín and screenwriter Steven Knight with all the subtlety of a tabloid headline. In the opening sequence, the disoriented Diana is compelled to ask for directions in a local café and is made palpably uncomfortable by the patrons’ stares and whispers. Later, she discusses the paparazzi’s “terribly powerful” new camera lenses targeting her from beyond Sandringham’s gates with Major Alistair Gregory (Timothy Spall). She explicitly compares herself to an insect under a microscope, her wings being plucked with tweezers. Innately authentic, she finds it impossible to follow her cold husband’s cold counsel to bifurcate herself into a “real” self and the one she “performs” for the cameras. 

The scrutiny of “The People” and the media outside the palace walls compels the Royals’ scrutiny within them, ever preoccupied with maintaining “appearances” for the “good of the country.” Diana is a captive under total surveillance; her rumored misbehaviors have already stirred enough “fuss.” Written on the tags of her strictly curated rotation of dresses is “P.O.W.”—“Princess of Wales” as Prisoner of War. Aside from a couple of sympathetic allies, namely the sympathetic chief chef and her favored dresser Maggie (Sally Hawkins), the house staff serve as prison guards, corralling her to meals and reporting her minor rebellions, with Major Gregory as chief jailer. Panopticon-like, there are eyes and ears everywhere. A sign in the palace kitchen warns staff to “Keep Noise to a Minimum—They Can Hear You,” but this admonition also applies to Diana, the subject of everyone’s gossip, unable to trust even her closest confidants completely.  

For her portrayal of Diana as a victim of the gaze-on-tabloid-steroids, Kristen Stewart has won plaudits and an Oscars Best Actress nomination, and deservedly so. But, as in Natalie Portman’s impersonation of a stiffly mannered First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy in Larraín’s Jackie (2016), half the battle is won in the casting. In Stewart’s case, not only her performance style but also her extradiegetic star persona seems custom fit to the role. The actress’s famed reticence in regard to her own highly-scrutinized mega-celebrity—shyly squirming through press junkets—translates readily onto her deer-in-the-headlights Diana. Not to mention that the performance gets a huge boost from accomplished cinematographer Claire Mathon (Portrait of a Lady on Fire and Atlantics [both 2019]), whose stalking movements and unnervingly extreme close-ups continually capture Diana’s unsettled state and her compulsion to escape.

Oppressed by the gaze, Diana is also weighed down by the Past, which dictates the traditions and appearances that she is charged with keeping up. Take, for instance, the Victorian jockey scale to which Sandringham guests are subjected to upon arrival and departure, to ensure they “enjoyed” the royally rich holiday meals—an imposition that feels personal to Diana, whose bulimia is immediately provoked. “No one is above tradition,” Major Gregory scolds. For Diana, the Royals and their historically bound rules represent stasis, death, and “doors closing,” prohibiting her human impulse toward forward movement. The ghosts of dead royals haunt her, quite literally in the case of poor Anne Boleyn, about whom Diana reads and dreams. In the history books about herself yet to be written, Diana worries that she will be identified in a single-word designation, much like “William the Conquerer” and Elizabeth the Virgin,” as “Diana the Insane.”

Worse yet is the effect of all this duty and tradition on Diana’s baby-faced boys, nine-year-old William (Jack Nielen) and seven-year-old Harry (Freddy Spry). Naturally chafing at the rules just as their mother does, they wonder why they can’t open presents on Christmas morning like “normal people” instead of on Christmas Eve, when the Royals are served first even by Father Christmas. Tragically precocious, William knows he has no choice but to be king someday. Mournfully, Diana explains that they are caught in the Past, in a world without present or future tenses and, thus, a world in which “There are no decisions to be made. Just what must be done.” Against such stifling predetermined stasis, Diana draws the boys into her minor rebellions, waking them in the middle of the night to play a candlelit game of truth-telling, in which the trio fantasize about what would constitute their “perfect Christmas”—“not following the rules and doing whatever you want…not showing up. What would that be like?” William wonders. “That would be a miracle,” Diana muses sadly.

And then there is the oppression of opulence—all the accumulated, stuffy stuff, the operation of which requires an absurd expenditure of State and total regimentation, as Spencer’s opening sequence underscores. Soldiers in combat gear march into Sandringham with massive crates that presumptively contain military-grade weapons but, surprising all viewer expectations, contain monarchy-grade haute cuisine, to be handled—with the changing of the guard—by the kitchen “brigade.” Holiday dining at Sandringham is grossly lavish, the menu oft-enumerated, visually and in dialogue: monstrous lobsters, “coddled eggs with cream sauce,” “organic pastries and cakes,” endless puddings, mousses, and soufflés—all of it obsessively overseen by production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and three food stylists on Spencer’s crew. But never mind making such lavish meals, it is a full-time occupation to attend them.

For Diana, each meal and official appearance (e.g., the “traditional morning worship [at] St. Mary Magdalene Church”) requires a change of outfit, a free spirit’s nightmare but a costume designer’s dream, in which the two-time Oscar-winning Jacqueline Durran (Little Women [2019] and Anna Karenina [2012]) certainly revels. There are Nineties blazers atop pencil skirts and timeless princess fantasies—a sage green satin sheath that is the color of money (and the first course of creamed pea soup); a dreamy ivory gown, all rhinestone-crusted bodice and tulle mermaid skirt (featured in the film’s ads and posters). The effect is to exalt Lady Di’s status as fashion icon, which works at cross purposes with the suggestion that the clothes are instruments of her oppression—magnets for the gaze, mercilessly tight and fussy, requiring a team of dressers, hours of prep, and the not-occasional “regurgitation” of so many kingly banquets. This cross-purpose is especially jarring in a mid-film fashion-magazine-like montage in which Diana models a parade of “looks,” including the famous twenty-pound wedding dress with its twenty-five-foot train.

Indeed, Spencer struggles against the cinema’s tendency to glorify wealth and status, especially such high-production-value cinema, with its own vast expenditures of treasure and talent. It all just looks so desirable. Cinematographer Mathon strains to make Diana gorgeous and unappealing, with a cold gray palette and dust-smote lighting that suggests the chill and death of winter. And production-designer Dyas strains to make Sandringham House—with exteriors and interiors filmed mostly on-location in a number of German castles—an “elegant prison” (his words), to make it repellent rather than aspirational, a pit of hell disguised as the lap of luxury. Sandringham’s rooms heave with dark tapestries, oil paintings in thick gold frames, bookshelves brimming with dusty history books, ornately hand-painted wallpaper, and stiff curtains. Laid heavily over much of it is an alternately melancholy and menacing score, filled with baroque chamber music and jazz gone atonal, by Jonny Greenwood—Hollywood auteurs’ preferred composer du jour, who also wrote the music for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog in 2021.

No one is coming to storm the castle to save Diana, unless you count her own storming of Park House, her childhood home located on the grounds of Sandringham Estate, which represents “Home” and her preroyal “Real Self,” now in a state of disrepair. Despite the Royals’ prohibitions, she visits Park House twice, in aborted midnight “escape” attempts. As is proper to a feminist deconstruction of fairy tales, Spencer is a story of Diana rescuing herself, of claiming agency. She does so in a series of escalating rebellions, first answering the Royals’ “microaggressions” against her with microaggressions of her own: always arriving late (for the three-day holiday, meals, the family portrait); swearing; leaving behind the pearls Charles gifted her, identical to the ones he gave Camilla, as “a gesture”; wearing the wrong outfits; cutting open the bedroom curtains the Royals have ordered sewn shut punitively to cloister her. Even Diana’s famous struggle with bulimia is understood through this lens, as an assertion of agency over her own body, a rejection of so many forced feedings. So are her hallucinatory flights of fancy (first introduced with the bulimia, in a scene in which she imagines choking down those awful pearls in her creamed pea soup)—all of which become assertions of agency over her own mind (“they” can’t control her “thoughts”). It is, after all, her hallucination of Anne Boleyn that saves her from suicide, instructing her, that—instead of dying—she needs to “Go! Run!”

The character of Maggie, too, can be understood in this light, a figment of Diana’s own strengthening mind. (Note an earlier moment in which Diana imagines another dresser is Maggie; and note Maggie’s hesitation in their next encounter when Diana asks her if she is real.) The pivotal scene in which Maggie proclaims her love for Diana can be understood as Diana claiming self-love, the hinge that opens the door, at which point Diana fixes upon her third and final escape attempt. She asserts to Maggie that she will “take her place among the pheasants,” meaning either take flight or die trying, and then throws her body in front of the rifles of the annual Boxing Day pheasant hunt, successfully demanding that she and her sons be released from captivity. Gleefully, the trio run to Diana’s open-topped Porsche and speed away, to the tune of Mike + the Mechanics’ “All I Need is a Miracle”—an on-the-nose needle-drop callback to the trio’s candlelit conspiracy. 

Thus, the arc of Spencer moves from Little Girl Lost to Self-Determining Mother. (In that same candlelit truth-telling game, the boys asked Diana, “Do you want to be the Queen,” to which she answered: “I’ll be your mum.”) It moves from the film’s title Spencer printed over a drone shot of Diana arriving into the crosshairs of Sandringham’s gray, manicured driveway, to her reclamation of her “Spencer” self, which she announces into a speaker at a KFC drive-thru—an example of Diana’s taste for “things that are real, things that are quite middle-class,” that are of the early Nineties Present and “The People.” (The latter are a heroized abstract in Spencer despite their implication in Diana’s death-by-public-consumption.)

If this all sounds a bit heavy-handed, that’s because it is. So much so that it can feel like a parody of well-worn feminist literary tropes: that pearl choker; the ghost of Anne Boleyn; Diana’s life-giving maternal warmth vs. the Royals’ deadly patriarchal chill (think Elton John’s “Candle in the Wind” tribute); all the references to hunted birds (on bedcovers, wallpaper, and dinner plates), banging us over the head with their association with the princess, who even talks to one such design piece mid-film. Not just in Diana’s conversations with birds, but with everyone else, every line of dialogue is freighted with meaning, overloaded with implications. Even more troubling, there is something sadistic about subjecting Princess Diana—and Kristen Stewart—to this film-length torture session, which might suggest a pattern, taken together with Larraín’s previous two films Jackie (2016) and Ema (2019), also about women-on-the-verge, who are forced to endure intense melodramatic paces while struggling to wrest agency from the patriarchal power to which they are adjacent.

In Spencer, perhaps most off-putting of all, though, is a fleeting moment when Larraín casually compares Diana’s oppression—and its psychological toil—to that of living under military authoritarianism, cutting from a scene of Diana’s misery to a scene of Queen Elizabeth’s annual Christmas Day television address, in which she speechifies stiffly about England serving as an example of “freedom” for “those who have recently broken free of dictatorships” in ex-Soviet-bloc countries—a juxtaposition meant to imply terrible hypocrisy on the Royals’ part. This comparison seems particularly flip from a filmmaker who has so astutely explored the psychological toll of military dictatorship in his acclaimed Pinochet trilogy of Tony Manero (2008), Post Mortem (2010), and No (2012).

Indeed, Larraín’s filmography generally cues us to expect more. Is he self-reflexive about the fact that his film perpetuates Diana’s captivity as an object of our (sadistic) fascination, as Diana the Dissected, the more she squirms the more we want to look? That he could be accused of exploiting her iconic figure in order to make a big-budget mood experiment, just currency to be passed between other’s hands (as she worries in the film)? Is that the meaning of the baseball cap Diana wears in the final shot, printed with “O.P.P.,” ostensibly the Ontario Provincial Police, but also—it has been speculated—a gesture to the contemporaneous pop song “O.P.P.”, an acronym for “Other People’s Property”?

Since at least No—a brilliant film about the advertising campaign that convinced the Chilean people to dethrone Pinochet in 1988—Larraín has been reflecting smartly on the intersections of power, performance, image, and “the People” (more complexly understood) in the late twentieth century, and productively rendering historical celebrities as flesh-and-blood human beings, even laying out their brains on morticians’ tables, as in the case of Salvador Allende and John F. Kennedy.

For me, in Spencer’s People’s Princess-as-Poultry, Larraín confuses his aim and misses his mark, the endeavor ill-conceived from the start.

Megan Feeney has a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota and is author of Hollywood in Havana: US Cinema and Revolutionary Nationalism in Cuba before 1959.

Copyright © 2022 by Cineaste Magazine 

Cineaste, Vol. XLVII, No. 2