Spencer
In Pablo Larraín's anarchic anti-royalist look at Princess Diana, the wealth and status of royalty are a trap from which no-one escapes happily
Spencer, Pablo Larraín’s anti-fairy tale about the late Princess Diana is, in many ways, a natural successor to his highly lauded Jackie Onassis biopic, Jackie. Yet one crucial difference is hinted at within the very titles; one a familiar first name, the other an abandoned second. Where Jackie sought to excavate the personal behind the public facade, interrogating the illusion of American mythmaking through a private account of the First Lady, Spencer is markedly less interested in the (re)humanisation of its subject than in how such mythmaking corrodes agency, how one woman’s sense of self was sacrificed in an act of self-preservation by the powerful.
The action begins on Christmas Eve 1991, right at the heart of Charles and Diana’s marital dissolution, as the latter – played with tremulous theatricality by Kristen Stewart – struggles to find Sandringham despite its neighbourly proximity to her childhood home. Larraín deftly imbues this haunted house of a royal residence with disturbing horror: endless blood-red corridors stretch into the distance while a sign in the kitchen reads “Please keep noise to a minimum, they can hear you” – simultaneously a stomach-churning synecdoche of the British class system and a portent of uncanny dread. Hallucinations and nightmares mount; Anne Boleyn haunts Diana with grim-faced solidarity while pearls from a necklace fall into the soup and are cracked and crunched.
A lavishly anarchic imagination threads throughout, but at its feverish heart Spencer is – there is no other word for it – sad. It is a strange take, perhaps, in a world where chauffeurs hold doors open for dogs, but the force of Larraín’s ardently anti-royalist spectacle is in its pinpointing of tragedy not just within Diana’s personal predicament, but within the structures of power that mandated it.
Wealth becomes a trap: a solid gold scale mercilessly weighs a bulimic woman, a rack of decadent clothes dictates her intimacies by the minute. No one is happy – not the Queen, presiding with Miss Havisham-like spectrality over the proceedings; not Charles, his face tight with careless misery. The pearls fall through the cracks, the hunted pheasants are thrown away. A young woman is driven insane. What, Larraín asks, gesturing at the wreckage, is the point of it all?
Spencer received its world premiere at the 2021 Venice Film Festival
The film screens at BFI London Film Festival on 7, 8 & 17 Oct, with satellite screenings at Edinburgh Filmhouse and Glasgow Film Theatre