Alice Fortt
Keep all noise at a minimum. They can hear you.
The opening shot of Pablo Larraín’s 2021 drama Spencer tells us everything we need to know about Princess Diana’s turmoil in a handful of simple words. A sign watching over an empty kitchen, soon full of soldiers bringing in precious cargo; boxes upon boxes of food for a lavish, ostentatious royal family Christmas. Carrots and potatoes are guarded by machine guns; treasure chests filled to the brim with lobster, turkey and cured meats are opened, filling the too-empty room with frosted steam; the cook’s battalion arrives, ready for war.
a lonely, isolated woman
All the while, the telling sign looks on, a warning that rules over all in the household, most ardently a lonely, isolated woman who feels simultaneously threatened and begrudgingly welcomed in this foreign battleground.
Spencer dives much farther into Diana’s psychological turmoil than perhaps more than any other adaptation of the princess’ life that I’ve seen. The audience is almost uncomfortably close to the protagonist; we experience everything she goes through first hand, her hallucinations, her pain, her paranoia.
This is emphasised through Larrian’s use of close, tight shots, taken at an awkward angle, creating an almost suffocating atmosphere as we watch the tiny shifts of panic across Diana’s face. Such suffocation is naturally reflected in the long, winding corridors of Sandringham, a never ending maze that Diana can never seem to escape from. Conversations are framed through shifting close up shots, rather than a wider mid shot, leaving nowhere to hide.
a neverending feeling of deep tension
Diana is chased by an unsteady camera as she runs through the dark halls of the house, akin to the paparazzi that plagued her for most of her life. It’s hard to not get stressed whilst watching Spencer. Jonny’s Greenwood’s low, haunting score helps this also, creating a neverending feeling of deep tension.
In relying purely on Diana as our narrator, with every single shot of Spencer being led by her own personal experience, the line between reality and fantasy gets blurred.
One truly felt as if one were Diana
I thought this was a fantastic decision from screenwriter Steven Knight; the lack of a sense of separation between audience and princess is a new line of writing in the roster of Diana adaptations, and made for a stifling experience. One truly felt as if one were Diana, living this oppressive life and feeling crushed under the pressure of it all.
Entire sequences were later revealed as pure hysterical fantasy, leaving the viewer constantly on edge and paranoid about the world they perceived around them, just as Diana was herself at Sandringham. It was a brilliant way to portray the princess’ poor mental state.
Spencer is as much an in memoriam as it is a psychological drama, and not for Diana, Princess of Wales, but Diana Spencer, the girl who was lost the second she said her wedding vows. ‘Spencer’ has become a myth to Diana in Spencer, a remnant of a time long past as represented by the empty, barren family home of Park House that looks forlornly over the lavish Sandringham estate.
Kristen Stewart plays this longing for the simplicity of childhood, of the safety of a family that loves you and the innocence of youth, brilliantly, becoming the tragic heroine that Larraín envisioned. Diana herself is a ghost, floating silently through the great estate, and Spencer gives us a brilliant sense of loss for what was and what could have been through this focus.
Stewart plays Diana as a woman who rebels her life through the small moments; deliberately wearing the wrong dress to an event, refusing to partake in archaic traditions, daring to show outward affection to her children; much like the real-life princess. The actress’s performance is right down to the fine details, like the small intake of breath the princess of Wales had a habit of taking before each sentence, or her specific upper-class accent.
nothing is too overdone, or too overdramatic.
Not to mention, the hysteria of the woman is captured perfectly by Stewart. Even in the midst of panic, Diana remains poised for the most part, as a woman of her background and training would be; nothing is too overdone, or too overdramatic.
It would be remiss to say that Spencer isn’t Oscar-bait. A period biopic of one of the world’s most well-known and beloved figures, released in Oscar season, with a famous actress (who conveniently doesn’t have an Academy Award yet) at its helm, directed by a previous award winner? It ticks all the boxes.
What I feel marks Spencer out as different from all the big period-biographical films that have previously gunned for Academy gold, however, is the psychological aspect of it. It’s a far darker take on the biographical picture drama than what we’ve seen in the past, which is what makes it so interesting and individual as a film.
Kristen Stewart is the fourth actress to portray Princess Diana in less than ten years, not to mention the newest stage adaptation, Diana, The Musical, that premiered just in the last couple of months with Jeanna de Waal in the title role. The public fascination with the ‘people’s princess’ is stronger than ever; from her tragic story to her iconic style to her quiet rebellion against ‘The Firm’.
One has to ask, at what point does the dramatisation of Diana’s life cross the line from respectful homage to morbid obscenity? Her two children are still very much alive; it makes one wonder at what they feel about all the different actresses who have played their own mother recently, nor all of those in the industry that are grabbing her story to, from a cynical standpoint, make money from it. It’s a hard wire to walk, to be sure.
Larraín’s addition to the roster of Diana media adaptations is a jewel in this cinematic crown. He has taken a story, a woman, that has been dramatized again and again, and yet somehow made it fresh, new, and even more heartbreakingly painful than it was before. Spencer is truly a mesmerising film.
Featured image courtesy of Annie Spratt on Unplash. No changes or alterations were made to this image. Image license can be found here.
Alice Fortt
Film and English graduate living in Wiltshire, and twitter editor here at Empoword! Lover of all things thriller, science-fiction and camp (and my cats of course)!.