Pablo Larrain’s Spencer is all about the foreshadowing. The movie’s conceit is summarised in a line uttered by its heroine, about how the ...
Pablo Larrain’s Spencer is all about the foreshadowing. The movie’s conceit is summarised in a line uttered by its heroine, about how the past is the present, the one and the same thing.
As for the future, we know how it panned out for the straw-haired woman who flits through long corridors and throws up her every meal. Ostensibly about a three-day episode in the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1991, Spencer is more directly about the death of the House of Windsor’s most tragic figure six years later.
Larrain and screenwriter Steven Knight set themselves the ambitious challenge of a fictionalised crawl inside Diana’s head during a nightmarish Christmas vacation at the British royal family’s Sandringham estate. Larrain’s Jackie (2016) had similarly explored the emotional state of Jackie Kennedy after the assassination of her husband John F Kennedy.
Spencer has the logic of a fever dream, stacked as it is with unsettling visuals, an eerie score and self-aware dialogue.
Already estranged from her husband Charles (Jack Farthing) and physically and mentally sick from the rituals of the British monarchy, Diana (Kristen Stewart) appears to be on the verge of a breakdown – or a breakthrough. Sandringham resembles a most plush...
