Spencer movie review: Kristen Stewart taps into Diana’s profound pain

If you think Spencer is going to be a conventional biopic, you’d be dead wrong.

Anyone expecting Spencer to be a standard biopic of Princess Diana is going to be sorely disappointed.

But you need only to contextualise Spencer within Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larrain’s body of work, specifically his Jackie Kennedy film, to know that the Kristen Stewart movie was never going to be a conventional retelling of Diana’s story.

As Larrain did with Jackie, capturing one of the world’s most famous women in a moment of acute emotional crisis (in Kennedy’s case, the death of JFK), Spencer is a compelling portrait of a woman who’s lost her sense of self.

It’s a resonant, eerie character study of loss of control and power, of being consumed by heartache and doubt. On that, Spencer and Jackie have much in common.

Set during Christmas 1991, mere months before Diana and Charles’ separation, Spencer is an intense and powerful work, elevated by Larrain’s poetic aesthetic and Stewart’s accomplished, considered performance.

Spencer is a surprisingly balanced work, one with a lot of emotional clarity to tell a story that is charged with profound pain.

Spencer is in cinemas now. Picture: Roadshow

It’s the royal family’s Christmas at Sandringham House, steeped in traditions including pheasant hunting, feasts, and the annual weigh-in on arrival. But the atmosphere is as cold as the rooms, where they steadfastly refuse to turn up the heating.

For Diana, the iciness is compounded by Charles’ treachery, his ongoing affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles at tipping point. It’s an open secret known to all while his attitude towards her is one of contempt.

She arrives late, she sits down to dinner after the Queen and is generally seen as a nuisance to be managed, except for a few kind staff members who want her to know that she is loved, if not by the Windsors, then by everyone else.

But she can’t get out of her head or her heart, haunted by the betrayal and rejection of a man who promised her love, honour and fidelity. She’s been stripped bare by his actions, manifesting in an eating disorder, paranoia and anxiety.

Diana wanders through the rooms and halls of Sandringham as if she’s already a ghost, and she believes she encounters one too in the form of Anne Boleyn, Henry VIII’s doomed second wife.

Boleyn’s place in history is an interesting parallel for Larrain to draw. She was controversial at the time, painted as someone who betrayed the King but whose fate, as posterity has shown, was tied into the ego and desires of a callous man who discarded her for someone else.

Kristen Stewart taps into Diana’s pain. Picture: Roadshow

Almost a quarter of a century after her death, Diana’s story is so well-known at this point that there is rarely anything new to her tale, but Spencer adds a different dimension.

With Stewart’s raw performance delving so deep into the interiority of a woman in emotional turmoil, Spencer becomes a film that is not only about Diana’s famous story, but about all women whose trust has been broken by the one person that pledged to be there for them always.

That is a powerful resonance for an all-too large club. Maybe that’s one of the reasons Diana remains the people’s princess, because her pain is shared.

There’s a lot that can be said about Spencer’s superb production design, costumes and score, but ultimately, what makes it a stunning piece of cinema is how effectively and authentically Larrain and Stewart tapped into that pain and trauma.

Rating: 4.5/5

Spencer is in cinemas now

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Originally published as Spencer movie review: Kristen Stewart taps into Diana’s profound pain